Despite the plethora of evidence illustrating otherwise, entertainment writer Brian Lowry took to Oliver Darcy’s website Status — which has twice threatened to cancel my subscription — Monday night to complain Sunday’s Oscars had “los[t] its voice” and “collective nerve” by refusing to pay proper tribute to the late Rob Reiner by making the evening a courageous stand against President Trump, a man Hollywood and their ilk have falsely maligned as terrifying dictator and pedophile.
Lowry had his thumb on the scale from the headline and subhead: “The Oscar Loses Its Voice; The Academy Awards paid tribute to Rob Reiner, but at a politically fraught moment closed a cautious awards season by steering clear of the outspokenness and activism that defined the director’s career.”
He complained that, even though the Academy Awards “delivered a heartfelt tribute to Rob Reiner,” the show “conspicuously avoided the director’s other defining trait—his progressive politics and activism—with no one overtly saying the name “Trump” on the stage during the three and a half-hour telecast.”
Lowry did his own impression of Eric Alterman, suggesting Hollywood isn’t really that liberal:
Much is made of “liberal Hollywood,” long a culture-war bogeyman for the right, so much so that even fleeting political references at the Academy Awards trigger howls of indignation. But during another war in the Middle East, there was nothing remotely resembling Michael Moore’s shouts of “shame on you” to George W. Bush in 2003, with this year’s documentary winner, David Borenstein, coming closest by issuing a thinly veiled warning about the threat of authoritarianism.
He huffed this year featured “traffic-seeking websites scrounging for headlines to find meaty movments, from O’Brien’s joke about the Epstein Files to presenter Jimmy Kimmel taking understated swipes at Trump and CBS, to presenter Javier Bardem saying, “No to war” and “Free Palestine” before getting down the business at hand.”
Comically, Lowry wants us to think those moments were not proof of any bent. Our Elise Ehrhard took on this year’s Oscars and found heapings of liberal quackery. You can also check out the links to see our reviews from the prior five years (2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020).
Lowry continued, whining “Barbara Streisand, and others” didn’t elaborate on their general lament about the times we’re living in and “thus do little to quiet those wondering if Hollywood has collectively lost its nerve in the face of a president who relishes lashing out at critics and the press, and a media ownership class that has exhibited its willingness to mollify him in service of their corporate agendas.”
Of course, he praised David Bornstein using his victory in the feature documentary category for Mr. Nobody Against Putin to warn democracy dies when, for example, too many remain quiet “when oligarchs take over the media and control how we produce it.”
“After he show, he elaborated to reporters, saying Russians told him the slide toward autocracy is ‘actually happening quicker in American than it’s been happening in Russia. Trump is moving a lot quicker than Putin in his early years,’” Lowry added.
Following a brief registration of his gripe more didn’t rip Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav for its impending sale to David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, he offered somewhat of a strawman: “The only thing likely to draw more fire than not enough politics is having too much, with critics on the latter front itching for something on which they can tee off.”
In Lowry’s world, “not enough politics” is the bigger issue whereas, over in reality, regular Americans would prefer not to be lectured.
The liberal shill concluded by doubling down on his thesis that he’s very disappointed in Hollywood for not having spent awards season seeing blood vis à vis Trump:
[T]rophies for political courage have been vanishingly rare—including on Hollywood’s biggest stage. Whether that represented the welcome respite O’Brien discussed or symbolizes an industry engaged in small acts of complicity—the kind Rob Reiner surely would have rejected—is, like debate over the merit of the Oscar winners, very much in the eye of the beholder.
