The Irrelevant Oscars

like fancy schmancy things. So, I mean, the reason why the OSCARS was in the old days a significant thing is because we were making and appreciating movies that had broad cultural appeal. Okay, you would have years where it was, you know, huge movies going up against you, Pulp Fiction and Forest Gump and Shawshank Redemption all up against each other at the same time, all three of them sort of classic, incredibly different, classic movies that people still remember

and watch and appreciate today. No one's gonna remember any of these movies. Okay, nobody's gonna give a crap about Anora. There's one movie about prostitutes. There's another movie about a transgend with a transgender biological male portraying a woman who

was up for Best Actress. Anyway, it was this. I think the Oscars could not make itself more irrelevant if it tried, But as a snapshot of what liberals are doing right now, there are a few things going through puberty on the air, a few things that I thought were kind of interest just reading about it after the fact. God knows, I did not watch the thing, all right,

So what are some of these interesting things? First, it seems as though even Hollywood is like, all right, let's tamper down on the trans stuff just a little bit. They had nominated a biological male who is presenting as a woman for the Best Female Actor award. By the way, this is another weird liberal convention. Why do they hate that? Yeah, I don't know how many of you have noticed this, but within the Oscars, like they don't say best actress

anymore now it's best female actor. Why female actor is a word that has replaced actress And I don't really understand. And why is actress sexist? I mean, I don't know. It's just in English, we have certain words that we can change them. The ending of it too, and it's kind of a convention that's coming from Latin. In Latin third declension, nouns very often would end in octor or actrix,

depending on if it's a male versus a female. And when that those words got englishized or stayed the same, but ix got changed, I X got changed to ess. So I don't know that there's a lot of you know, temptor versus temptress or whatever. A lot of words changed like that. And we used to say actress all the time, but all of a sudden, it was like within the last like ten years that changed. I don't know why. I guess someone decided it was sexist to call female

actors actresses. Why do you think the work they're doing is inherently of a different category than the work that male actors engage in. I mean, you're the guys who have the categories that the Oscars for Best Male Actor, Best Female Actor. I mean you could just put them all in one pot, you know, best actor period, just pick between men and women for that distinction. I don't know. I'm not the one who set the rules for the Oscars, but so I don't know. Yeah, we're going to keep

the category separate on the basis of sex. But you're a sexist if you say actress, this word that I don't know, we've had and used within English for a really long time. Anyway, it's weird the sort of pathologies and hang ups that liberals have, all right, But basically, there was an opportunity the Oscars had to say that a biological man is winning Best Female Actor, and they

didn't do it. And I don't know if that is that a deliberate decision on the part of the Academy that like, hey, clearly the trans thing is not very popular right now, We're gonna make ourselves look even more ridiculous to an enormous swath of the country if we make a biological man the Best Female Actor award recipient. Maybe we shouldn't go down this path now, I don't know. I mean, the Academy is not a single unifical voice. I mean, it's a large number of people all voting

for something. So instead they give the award to this woman who was in this movie that I guess in some way was detailing the lives of prostitutes, and the woman who wins Best Actress. She spends her acceptance speech talking about her solidarity with the sex worker community. Now, this is what I want to talk about. So much of left wing activism is focused around looking at some group that's engaged in some kind of practice the left favors. And I see this a lot with the abortion issue.

There's the abortion issue, there's transgender stuff, and there's also there's also this push viewing this with sex workers, where you take the exceptional thirty twenty five percent maybe less than that, the exceptional five percent maybe, and ignore the overwhelming majority of cases to act as though the positive attitudes that the five percent or the twenty percent have with something is the norm and that it outweighs the

other seventy five to eighty percent. We know that, for example, like I talk about this in the abortion context, we know that seventy percent of women who have abortions feel like they have no other choice. They feel coerced into having an abortion because of their economic and other economic social pressure from a boyfriend, pressure from family members, in some cases outright coercion. They feel coerced into having an abortion by their situation. It's about seventy percent of women.

But the left promotes abortion with you know, smiling accomplished young women. Oh, I just need to you know, I'm just not ready here. I got to finish my master's degree. The left focuses on the thirty percent of women who are like, yes, this is my choice and my option, and this is I'm exercising the full throes of freedom right now. They focus on that as if that's typical,

and it's not. What abortion is for the most part in America today is people living in bad circumstances, the result of the breakdown of the American family, the result of the breakdown with healthcare provision through programs like medical et cetera, the breakdown with not having a lot of not having enough money because you're getting pregnant at a

time when you're not stable and you're not ready. The proliferation of contraception, which I think gives people a false sense of security that they can engage in sexually risky behavior with people they're not committed to, much like with abortions, so with sex workers. It's a bizarre little pet cause that the Left has. They don't trumpet it too much because if you really try to make a big deal of it on the national stage, people will be like, oh,

you mean like prostitution. Yeah, that's what they mean prostitution. So what the left does is they'll focus on the five percent maybe of prostitutes who are happy doing what they do, are successful selling whatever on OnlyFans are successful

and happy. They'll find some situation of prostitutes in some enlightened European country that allows legal prostitutions, say see in the United States, where punitively punishing women for engaging in sex work and sex work is real work, ignoring the ninety percent whatever it is, of women involved in the sex trade who are desperate to get out, who are only doing it out of enormous economic or social duress, the enormous percentage of women who have substance abuse problems

within the sex trade, and let's not forget the enormous percentage of women who are victims of sexual assault or sex trafficking who work within the sex trade. The overwhelming majority, and with no acknowledgment that inherently with quote sex work. It's the kind of quote work that within one nano second can go from ooh, consensual activity to rape like in a nanosecond, literally in a second. So I don't know where this came from. I mean, I don't know

where this attitude came from. It's kind of a weird look where, you know, just you know, six seven years ago was when we had the me too movement start and all these women in Hollywood showed up to the Oscars wearing black, you know, insolidarity with women who've been me tooed. And now we're talking about how wonderful sex work is. Do they understand how totally out of touch?

I mean, granted, it would have been more out of touch if they had made an actual biological male the if they had made an actual biological male the winner of the Best Female Actress category, that would have just ramped it into overdrive. But maybe it shows even further their irrelevance that they choose to honor an award, give a bunch of awards to this movie that's apparently about sex work and about how wonderful it is. That that's front and center, something that I think has like no

purchase with the American public. You know what it does actually have purchased with the American public. That does actually rev a lot of engines as far as people caring about it politically, willing to go to the polls for it, motivating even bipartisan support for it in a state like California is the evil of sex trafficking. Let's not forget. It was about two years years ago that Shannon Grove, are my state senator who has an enormous state Senate

district that includes Clovis. Shannon Grove introduced a bill to classify sex trafficking of a minor as a quote serious felony under California law. Basically, there's this kind of many distinction in California law between there's a normal you know, there's the normal misdemeanor felony distinction. Misdemeanors is a crime punishable by less than a year in jail. Felony is a crime punishable by more than a year in jail. And then there's the sort of subcategory called serious felonies

in California law. And basically it can mean a lot of different things, but one of the things that refers to is a crime, a felony that is subject to being one of your three strikes under California's three strikes law. Sex trafficking of a minor was not so classified Aliforny law wasn't deemed a serious felony, so Shannon Grove said, hey, I think few things more evil than sex trafficking a minor. I think it should be classified as a serious felony.

And what happened, well, at first, Reginald Joanes Sawyer from the California State Assembly, the Assembly Public Safety Committee, Reginald Joones Sawyer usc grad by the way, buried the bill embarrassingly, shockingly, disgracefully buried the bill in committee after it had passed through all the committees in the Senate because he just basically takes the position with public safety, I'm not beefing

up any criminal law enforcement at all. African Americans are disproportionately arrested, convicted, whatever, so therefore I'm just not I'm not going to pass anything that increases criminal penalties, period. And there was so much support for Grove and so much anger at what Joan Sawyer had done that Gavin Newsom himself had to step in to tell Reginald Joon Sawyer, hey, you idiot, you're resurrecting this bill. You're gonna vote for this bill. All the Democrats are going to vote for

this stupid bill. Gavin Newsom came in to salvage the thing. Okay, that's how much the American people don't like sex trafficking. So congratulations to the Oscars. I mean, they tried to pull people in with Conan O'Brien as the host, although I mean, I like Conan O'Brien, but I don't know that most Americans find Conan all that funny. You know. That's why he didn't get the Tonight Show. Ultimately, seemingly, or at least in the judgment of NBC. I mean,

they tried to reel people in with Conan O'Brien. Conan O'Brien's pretty darn funny, but it didn't quite work. Didn't quite work because none of the movies have any sort of significance. All right, when we return, let me go through a couple of Oscars years and read you the names of the films nominated and all compare it against the names of the films nominated this year. That's next

on the John Girardi Show. I want to talk about just how irrelevant the Oscars have become by let me read the list of movies nominated and see if you recognize like any of them. Okay, so first the movie that actually won Best Picture, Anora. I think we all ignored it. I didn't even know. I never heard of this movie until like yesterday, The Brutalist. No idea. Is it about architecture? A complete unknown? Okay, I think I know that one. That's the biopic about Bob Dylan with

Timothy shah Alime didn't watch it. Conclave that's the ridiculous movie about that not too many of you probably saw about. Like a pope has died and it's about the cardinals going into the conclave to elect a new pope and they wind up electing a biological woman to be pope. That's that's the big twist at the end, which is the stupidest story I've ever heard in my life. Dune part two. Okay, I heard about that that a lot

of people. Actually that's the one movie in this list. Okay, there's two movies in this list that a lot of people actually saw. Okay, Amelia Perez. That's the movie with the guy, the biological male pretending to be a woman. That's Amelia Perez. And that biological man was nominated for Best Female Actor. So that's Amelia Perez. No idea what it's about. I'm still here. Well, that's a name of a movie. I have no idea what it is is about. I'm not here for it. Nickel Boys, no idea, the Substance,

never heard of it? And Wicked, Okay, I heard of that. That's again, there were two movies that were actually popular that were within the Best Picture nominating thing. Okay, so I had heard of four of these movies. Conclave for Being Stupid, Complete Unknown, Wicked, and Dune Part two. Okay, so I'd only heard of four of the ten. Now, let me compare that against nineteen ninety four, nineteen ninety five, nineteen ninety six. Listen to some of the movies that

were being nominated back then. In nineteen ninety four, the Shawshank Redemption, Fantastic Movie Quiz Show, Don't know too much about that one, pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction was like one of the most influential movies ever. Four Weddings in a Funeral, Don't know too much about it. Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump was the one that actually won. Okay, these are heavy hitters, like and they only had five nominees back then. Three of the five are like all time legendary movies. Let's

go to nineteen ninety five, Sense and sensibility. Good movie Babe, the live action adaptation of Babe Apollo thirteen. Are you freaking kidding me? If you want to be proud to be an American? Go watch Apollo thirteen. Go on the fourth of July. Pop in Apollo thirteen. Look at these nerds with their button up, short sleeve dress shirts and big,

thick rimmed glasses. All these engineers who probably had served in World War Two or in the Korea, who are figuring out how to get a space shuttle with a bunch of doomed astronauts in it back to Earth safely. You're never going to be prouder to be a freaking American. It's the coolest freaking movie ever. And then, oh sorry, I forgot to mention the Best Picture winner from nineteen

ninety five, Braveheart, Freaking Brave Heart. So again, like three or four of the nineteen ninety five nominees heavy hitters remembered forever the Best Picture nominee, and the Oscars used to mean something, but now the I don't know what kind of freaking morons from the Academy Award. I don't know what the problem is. I mean, look, I'm a Johnny cum lately commenting on this. I'm not some grand film critic or anything like that, but like it used to be that they could make movies that were like

artistically significant but also could generate mass audiences. Like nineteen ninety six You Got Jerry Maguire and Fargo were both nominated. Those are great movies. Nineteen ninety seven La Confidential, great movie, Goodwill Hunting, great movie, The Full Monty I don't know much about as good as it gets. Oh that's Jack Nicholson. And then Titanic Okay, okay, like see the best picture.

I don't know why the OSCARS have chosen to relegate themselves to just be basically being like a trade show, a trades awards show for a bunch of It's like, I don't know, It's like if the American Librarians Association had a Best New Novels of the Year award and it was a bunch of novels that nobody had read. I mean, that's effectively what the OSCARS is, and yet we spend as much ink and time and energy talking about it as if it's still you know, trying to

decide between pulp fiction Forrest Gump and Shawshank Redemption. When we return, I talk about the Ukraine thing and how I'm having a hard time finding much to criticize Donald Trump about. That's next down the John Girardi Show. So all the Ukraine stuff broke on Friday, kind of after I had done my show, which was great, so I didn't get to talk about it much on Friday. I'm going to talk about it right now now. I'm not afraid to criticize Trump when he needs to be criticized

on social conservative stuff and abortion related stuff. I'm you know, I call balls and strikes. I've been very happy with a lot of Trump things, have been very critical of a lot of other Trump things. The IVF push by Trump, I think is really concerning ethically from a lot of perspectives, you know, about what are we doing with all the excess embryos that are being created via IVF? Are we going to result in more embryos created that way if Trump keeps pushing IVF the way he says he wants,

et cetera. So I'm I'm willing to call balls and strikes with Trump, and I'm willing to call balls and strikes more generally with Trump administration. Stuff. I think the whole fiasco last week with the Epstein documents where they made this big deal there, oh, we got all the Epstein documents and we're gonna release them, and then they release them and it's all a bunch of stuff everybody

already knew about. And then Pam Bondi's sort of trying to do a cya and so oh, I heard there's a bunch more documents to the New York Field Office of the FBI, and they didn't hand it over to me. Like, okay, well, maybe that's true. Maybe Pam Bondi's trying to do a big cya here because you knows, she didn't release anything interesting. And also like maybe there are more documents that she

wasn't given. But like, I don't know, if this guy's like a criminal genius mastermind, he probably doesn't have like a list of guys who engaged in prostitution on my island, Guys that I caught in the act having sex with underage prostitutes on my island. Here's the list. Dear future FBI investigators, I have left you a helpful list for my future criminal prosecution. Signed Jeffrey Epstein. I think I keep calling him David Epstein. Do I call him David Epstein?

That must be like a base that like a there's some other celebrity named David Epstein, And every time I think about Jeffrey Epstein, I always want to call him David Epstein. Anyway, Yeah, David Epstein was is a sports journalist of some kind, all right now. So I'm willing to call balls and strikes with the Trump administration, and I'm willing also to call balls and strikes when it

comes to foreign policy stuff in the Trump administration. I don't think the Gaza solution that Trump and that Trump sort of trumpeted makes a lot of sense. But at the same time, I don't know that anything makes a lot of sense with Gaza, and I think Trump sort of introduces crazy, hyperbolic ideas to sort of get people to concede to other better kinds of solutions. I think you can sort of see that with the Gaza thing. The immediate turn from what you can't do that to

Gaza that would be insane. Okay, well, you guys come up with a better solution, then all you Middle Eastern countries, why don't you handle your problems in the Middle East all these Arab countries around Palestine that want to cry big alligator tears for the plight of the Palestinian people and then don't lift a finger to freaking help them. Okay, the Egyptians who were like, you know, when Israel was about to go into Gaza and Egypt, which so Egypt

borders the Gaza Strip. Gaza Strip is sort of the southwest corner of Israeli territory and it borders Egypt and Egypt basically said when the Israelis were starting they're bombing, Nope, we're taking zero Gosen refugees. Sorry, not taking them. Jordan, which is near the West Bank, is not. We don't want any of these palace dates. No, we don't want to give them a home. But you, Israel, you're a

bunch of bad guys. So Trump's I think trying to sort of be like, hey, you don't like my idea of clearing all the Gosins out of Gaza and rebuilding the whole thing with a bunch of beach friend You don't like that idea, all right, you guys come up with an idea, you guys freaking fix it, all right. So, and I'm critical of American foreign policy. Why we keep providing military funding for Israel. I don't know why we

necessarily need to do that. I don't mind Israel engaging in military defense, although I think they're conduct within wartime questions that are very thorny in Israel's case because of the way that Hamas operates. Anyway, I'm not basically just trying to give you the reviso. I'm not an unqualified Trump cheerleader in almost any field. Maybe nobody really is.

I mean, I think all of us have. There are certainly some Trump diehards who never think that Trump has ever sneezed incorrectly, But I think all of us have enough of an independent brain in our head to be able to judge and discern between did Trump do this

right or did he do that wrong? All that to say, I fail to see a single thing so far Trump is done wrong with regards to Russia, Ukraine, et cetera, including the blow up on Friday where all the people who actually watched the full fifty minute sit down press conference in the Oval Office between Trump Advance on one side and Zelensky on the other agreed that it was Zelenski who everything was super cordial and fine for the first forty minutes, and then Zelensky kind of blew it up,

and Zolensky is wanting more security guarantees than we are willing to give. And Zelensky's mad because he's like, if you have a peace agreement with Putin, he'll break it. It's like, okay, well, we understand that Putin's a bad actor. That's why we're gonna do this mineral rights deal. It'll commit the United States to being in there. You know, our national interests will now be implicated, which will deter Russia from invading. But you know what, there's a certain

limit to what America is going to do. Okay, We're we're maybe not gonna put troops on the ground, our own troops on the ground, maybe a sort of piece king force to sort of deter any future activity. But the kinds of security guarantees Zelensky wants are a little bit more than we want to give. And to blow it up in public like that, like Zelensky did, I'm not sure why Trump and Vance are at fault for saying,

what the heck are you doing? We had a whole plan here for what this day was gonna look like we were gonna have this nice little press conference in front of the press for about forty minutes, then we were gonna have a lunch, then we were gonna go have a private meeting where we sign stuff. And certainly if Zelensky wants to be a little more forceful in private and discuss stuff more in private, but clearly Zelenski's trying to leverage things publicly. Now Zelenski wants to do that, fine,

but understand that. You know, you're not dealing with Joe Biden anymore. You're dealing with Donald Trump. And Donald Trump has an independent brain in his head, and he's not gonna roll over for you trying to get all the European countries to rally behind Oh how terrible Donald Trump. He doesn't give a crap about that. Do you want this mineral rights deal or not? Do you want America to have some kind of economic investment in Ukraine that

provides you with security guarantees or don't you? And Trump's not gonna sort of budge or be pushed around when it comes to these kinds of negotiations. So I guess I fail to see anything wrong with what Trump's doing, and just more broadly with regards to Ukraine. Okay, the idea that people are criticizing Trump for pursuing a piece deal with Putin. Look, what is the end goal for the more belkos pro Ukraine people. Is the end goal actually not one Russian boot on one piece of Ukrainian soil,

Because if that's the goal, that's insane. Okay. I've looked at the mass of where the battle lines are. They haven't moved in two years. Okay, Russia conquered a lot of territory at the very beginning. The Ukrainians pushed them out of a good chunk of territory, particularly in the north, and the battle lines of you know, Ukrainian territory that Russia's in control in where the battle lines are between Russian and Ukrainian control, they haven't really moved in two years.

Ukraine doesn't have the means to propel another big offensive. Russia just simply has more men. America has already poured two hundred billion dollars worth of funding into this thing. How much are we expected to pour in a trillion? And frankly, I don't know that the Ukrainians have the man power to really ultimately push the Russians back. So

what are you gonna do? Are you going to accept the reality that it's unlikely that Russia is gonna get completely kicked out of Ukraine and you engage in negotiations with some territorial concessions. How can you give concessions to Vladimir Putin? He's evil. It doesn't mean you think he's a good guy. It means you're acknowledging the reality of what's happened. This big, strong neighbor invaded a small weak neighbor, took a bunch of its land. It was unfair and

it was unjust, and it was wrong. And Vladimir Putin's a very bad guy, and he's an evil guy. The war wasn't justified. But what else do you want? Do you just want the war to continue indefinitely forever. Hundreds of thousands of people, I mean, I don't even know what the casualty numbers are, but it's tens of thousands

at least of people have died in this war. Where and right now, all we're fighting over is it's like World War One almost where we're fighting over moving the trenches, you know, a mile one way or a mile another way. And Trump. Trump is like the only guy on the international stage seemingly who's acknowledging this is a terrible thing.

All these people dying like we should stop this. So, yeah, it might require some concessions to Putin, and yeah, maybe it also requires not bad mouth and Putin left, right and center. I mean, you know, if you're trying to, hey, let's try and work out a peace deal here. We don't agree with what you did, but this is bad for the world, this is bad for Ukraine. Let's try and stop this, Let's end this. Like, you can't do that if you're also saying you're an absolute mon certainly.

I mean, I don't know. I don't think it's sacrificing American moral clarity to not say that to Putin when we're actively arming the Ukrainians and giving them weapons to fight an ongoing war right now, which Trump is still doing. So I guess I just find it very hard to understand what exactly Trump has done that's wrong here. I don't want this war to continue. The only way that actual quote victory can be achieved if by victory you mean again, not one Russian boot on one piece of

Ukrainian soul. The only way that's gonna happen is if American troops show up. And as someone who has a little brother who's an officer in the United States Army, let me just say, I don't want him to go over there. I don't want him to fight a war for the donbas I don't want him to fight a war for the sake of vindicating crimea. I just don't

want it. I don't see how that is really clearly critically in the American national interest, and I much favor the approach, much more favor the approach of Donald Trump trying to get a piece deal. When we return, I do a little self promotion for another Peace of Mind that ran at National Review that's next on the John Girardi Show. Not to engage in self promotion, but that's

precisely what I'm gonna do. If you go to my Twitter account Twitter dot com slash Fresno Johnny at Fresno Johnny, you can read my next piece that's on National Review online. It's about the abortion issue. As always. Basically, what I'm talking about is how to message the pro life view better.

I think a lot of pro lifers over the last you know, thirty years or so, sort of thought, well, science is going to win the abortion debate, you know, as medical science improves, and you know, ultrasound imaging technology improves, and in utero surgical interventions improve and all these different science things improve to show people very clearly the distinct

humanity of the unborn child. As long as that keeps improving, then abortion numbers will go down because people will see the humanity of the unborn it'll destroy all the ethical arguments for it. And I realize that that has not worked. Okay, over the last twenty years, We've had all these big advances, and the pro life position is less popular than it was twenty years ago. And I think it's because people view the abortion issue fundamentally as a question of burdens.

Pregnancy future child rearing impose burdens, and people look at women in difficult economic or social or otherwise situations and say, that would be a very difficult burden for her to handle. So maybe the more compassionate thing is to let her have an abortion, which is a cheap form of compassion, I'd say, a cheap and phony form of compassion. I would say a more authentic form of compassion would be why don't I actually help this person to handle these burdens.

And that's obviously a much more effective form of compassion, given that seventy percent of women who have abortions would rather keep their babies. They just feel forced into having an abortion because of the circumstances of finances, economics, whatever. So I really hope you'll give it a read. I'm super excited about my work appearing in National Review and them seemingly wanting to have me, wanting me to write more stuff for them, and I hope I can keep

on pumping out good stuff. Anyway, give it a read and hopefully you can get past the paywall. That'll do it. John Girardi Show, See you next time on Power Talk