I don’t usually gamble, but I do like to have the odd flutter on all things political, where a man who ignores the mainstream media echo chamber has a pretty good chance of beating the house. We all know that Hollywood awards oppression and virtue-signalling over anything resembling competence and talent, so when I learned that the director of the best foreign language film The Salesman was… an Iranian Muslim, I knew that in the current climate, the film taking out the Oscar will be as much of a certainty as an unfortunate young lad catching the eye of director Brian Singer at one of his questionable Hollywood parties.
But when I looked at the odds, I realised that Hollywood has become so bereft of artistic merit and so predictable in its virtue signalling that even Sportsbet knew that it was a foregone conclusion. I only usually punt smallish amounts on these things so it hardly seems worth it.
$1.75. Not exactly what you’d call an outsider. Even still, if you like a flutter with a bit more of your hard-earned, say a few hundred dollars, this could well be the safest and most profitable bet you place all year. A win for director Asghar Farhadi would prop up the wonky liberal Hollywood narrative of every Muslim refugee far more likely to be a Stephen Spielberg or Martin Scorsese than unassimilated and welfare dependent. Farhadi’s film may be Citizen Kane, but it would still take home the Oscar if it were Leonard Part 6. There’s always a slim chance that a more worthy film might win, but after last year’s celluloid hostage situation from Black Lives Matter, you have to ask yourself, “would the Academy dare not to give an Oscar to someone from Trump’s seven countries, even if it needed to be the Syrian handing out the canapés?”
It’s your XYZ.
Photo by Marcin Wichary 