Kulturkampf

[Polident]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/06/ranked-choice-at-the-movies/

Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite shook the Academy Awards to its core. How did it happen? Why is it the Zohran Mamdani of the movies? Before ranked-choice voting became the fashion for blue-state liberals seeking to control election outcomes, liberal Hollywood had already popularized the scheme.

As the Oscars in the new millennium continued to lose popularity and TV viewership, the Academy became distressed. Undoubtedly pressured by the need to appease ABC-Disney’s broadcast agreement, it desired high ratings. But the program that the Academy supplied could not account for the industry’s radical shift away from quality and prestige films. Voters who were manipulated by more than a decade of Harvey Weinstein’s high-pressure “taste” campaigns had reflexively ignored such adolescent trash as Christopher Nolan’s Batman blockbuster The Dark Knight.

The Academy’s website features a cartoon to explain “a voting system that employs the fairest possible outcome for nominations and for who wins the Oscar for Best Picture.” It’s a distortion of the already misunderstood sentiment: “democracy.” It essentially violates the majority-rules concept in favor of pretending to satisfy the whole. In fact, it ignores the majority. It degrades what is supposedly an aesthetics-based competition. From my decades of experience in critics’ awards groups, I know how winners result from strategic voting and weighted, preferential ballots that never actually reflect critical discernment, just improvised jockeying toward a public statement. But ranked-choice voting is far from fair; it’s a deceptive power grab and pretense that reflect Hollywood’s lingering communist legacy.

The site’s cartoon features a sample film titled An Unverifiable Veracity, apparently some joke by an Al Gore supporter riffing on the sham climate-change documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Even when the Academy explains its own newly “democratized” voting plan, the fix is already in.