WHEN I THINK OF THE OSCARS, I THINK OF A BUNCH OF HARVEY WEINSTEIN AND JEFFREY EPSTEIN SYCOPHANTS TRYING TO PRETEND TO MORAL SUPERIORITY:
You are literally watching them try to eat one of their own. Timothée souffle.
— Joseph Kahn (@JosephKahn) March 16, 2026
Once upon a time, the Academy of Arts and Picture Sciences vowed to make the interminably long Oscar ceremony shorter by any means necessary.
The Academy also tried to reign in the night’s incessant lecturing, with some modest success.
Now, as the film industry faces the very worst head winds in ages, including A.I. to audience indifference, both efforts got tossed in the scrap heap.
That meant Sunday’s Oscars gala was insanely long and chockablock with hard-Left messages. Free Palestine! Anti-Trump again and again. You name it, a presenter or award winner said it.
Big stars. Lesser-known talents. A united front in The Resistance, Part Deux. Hollywood does love its sequels.
None captured the night more than Javier Bardem, who hasn’t spared a syllable about the thousands slaughtered in Iran or the Israelis massacred on Oct. 7. The “F1” star barked “free Palestine and no war in Iran” the second he stepped before the microphone later in the show.
It didn’t begin that way.
Second-time host Conan O’Brien kicked off the night in good spirits, impersonating Aunt Gladys from “Weapons” for a wonderfully silly opening sketch. His monologue started strong, too.
“I’m proud to be the last human host of the academy awards,” he cracked, acknowledging the AI elephant in the room. He quickly made the night’s Resistance branding official.
“Last year, Los Angeles was on fire … this year, everything’s going great,” he said before doing the obligatory nod to ChalametGate.
This … could be worse.
Then, O’Brien channeled his inner Jimmy Kimmel.
“Tonight could get political,” he warned, but he offered a faux solution. “There’s an alternative Oscars hosted by Kid Rock at the Dave and Busters down the street.”
Dear right-leaning America. You may tune out now. And, likely, many who initially trusted O’Brien to stick to his apolitical brand did just that.
They were the lucky ones.
O’Brien cited the lack of British stars in the major acting categories, noting the response from an anonymous British official about that state of affairs.
“At least we arrest our pedophiles,” O’Brian said, a possible attempt to tie President Donald Trump to the Epstein Files, without evidence. The flawed premise was even more flawed than many thought.
Try Googling “British grooming gang scandal.” We’ll wait.
O’Brien dropped the comedy in the last part of the monologue, referencing, “chaotic, frightening times” and a plea for optimism.
Good luck with this crowd.
O’Brien cemented the activist mood with this hacky line.
“We’re coming to you live from the Has a Small Penis Theater. Let’s see him put his name in front of that,” O’Brien said.
No one actually uttered Trump’s name. They didn’t have to. He lives in their minds, forever influencing their actions and lectures.
From there, it was a blur of boredom, Identity Politics and anti-Trump slams.
O’Brien delivered a few pre-planned bits throughout the night, from the effective (a company making classic films fit your iPhone screen) to the lethargic (O’Brien acting like royalty while “winning” an Oscar).
A few highlights? Kumail Nanjiani suggesting more films should be shrunken to fit the “Live Short” format. Get more comedians on stage, and stat.
Sean Penn, as promised, was a no-show so Kieran Culkin accepted his Best Supporting Actor award for “One Battle After Another.”
He couldn’t be here, or didn’t want to,” the “Succession” alum muttered.
Here’s guessing that third Oscar will be Penn’s last, but could any actor truly hunger for more than that?
The standard In Memorium segment got super-sized for tragic reasons.
The Rob Reiner tribute, gracefully assembled by Billy Crystal and a gaggle of former Reiner cast members, hit all the right notes. Barbra Streisand gave a heartfelt tribute to the late,great Robert Redford that was more about her than him.
The industry did lose some giants in 2025, although highlighting Reiner, Keaton and Redford but not Robert Duvall came off as just plain wrong.
He’s as big a film icon as his peers. Maybe bigger.
RELATED: ‘REAGAN’ NOT DIVERSE ENOUGH FOR THE OSCARS
It’s hard to catalog the night’s virtue signal tally.
Even that In Memorium segment singled out late female artists for special consideration.
Except Rachel McAdams and co. couldn’t honor the late Brigitte Bardot, who appeared in more than 40 films. Maybe she said the wrong thing about the Culture Wars.
You couldn’t pen a better Oscars parody, from start to finish.
The night belonged to, what else, “One Battle After Another.”
The film won for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture, letting director Paul Thomas Anderson to give away the game in his speeches.
“I wrote this movie for my kids .. to say sorry for the housekeeping mess we left for the world we’re handing off to them,” Anderson said.
The rest of the night included a stilted “Bridesmaids” reunion that, like the gala, went on too long. Once again, major movie stars took the stage and fumbled their canned lines or said lines simply let them down.
The mini-“Avengers” reunion with Robert Downey, Jr. and Chris Evans proved a prime example. We can’t write better banter for these two pros?
For those happy to be spared a fifth Jimmy Kimmel hosting gig, that euphoria was short-lived. The late-night propagandist gave out the documentary awards and did what he always did.
Reveal his TDS may lap everyone not named Robert De Niro.
“We hear a lot about courage on shows like this,” Kimmel began, noting “some countries have leaders who don’t support free speech … I’m not at liberty to discuss them.”
He then cited North Korea and CBS, the latter targeted for not wanting to lose $40 million a year for the honor of employing Stephen Colbert.
Kimmel wasn’t done. He then took not one but two swipes at “Melania,” a 2026 documentary that made more money than the vast, vast majority of nonfiction films.
It’s a movie about “walking around the White House trying on shoes,” Kimmel quipped. “Oh man, is he gonna be mad that his wife wasn’t nominated for this,” Kimmel added later, ignoring the fact that “Melania” wasn’t eligible for 2025’s Oscar competition.
Imagine a whole night of that wit? Bullet, dodged.
Michael B. Jordan gave a strong acceptance speech for his Best Actor award on behalf of “Sinners,” but he, too, played the Identity Politics card as if he were the first, second, third or 10th black actor to win a major award.
He even praised Will Smith, yeah, that Will Smith, in his speech. Hmmm.
And then it was over, more than three and a half hours later. Those who predicted “One Battle After Another” would rule the night being were proven correct.
Now, the assembled stars can think long and hard about their industry’s sketchy future and the wisdom of telling half the country to pound sand.
The post Oscars 2026 Review: Resist, They Must appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.
Big infrastructure projects in the developing world for things like water and electricity are under-pressure. Chinese and US funding is down and these projects often fall apart due to corruption and political incentives to build but not maintain. It is possible to break old institutions and establish new ones, but “there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” Connor Tabarrok gives a great example. Ek Son Chan in Cambodia:
In 1993, the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority was a catastrophe. The city was emerging from decades of war and genocide. Only 20 percent of the city had connections at all, and water flowed for just 10 hours a day. 72 percent of the water was non revenue water. It was lost to leaks or stolen through illegal connections.
Into this mess walked Ek Son Chan, a young Cambodian engineer appointed as Director General. Over the next two decades he executed an incredible institutional turnaround.
Chan replaced corrupt managers with qualified engineers. He got rid of unmetered taps. Every single connection received a meter and was billed. The old system of manual billing was replaced with a computerized system, which cut down on low level employees giving out free water and receiving kickbacks. Bill collection rates went from 48 percent to 99.9 percent. These changes were intensely unpopular, and Chan faced fierce resistance from rent seekers, from freeloading customers to his own employees. He established an incentive system based on bonuses among the workers, introduced an internal discipline system with a penalty for violators, and set up a discipline commission for all levels of the organization to deal with corruption
He divided the distribution network into pressure zones with flow monitoring. A 24 hour leak detection team walked the streets at night with listening bars to identify underground leaks.
The institutional change dwarfed the infrastructural change, but was absolutely necessary to make the infrastructure investment worthwhile….
This commitment would not be untested. When Chan tried to enforce bill payment on Cambodia’s elite, and sent his team out to install a water meter on the property of a high ranking general who had been freeloading. The general refused the installation of a meter, so the team attempted to disconnect the water. The general and his bodyguards ran them off the property. When Chan heard of this, he decided not to back down, and mobilized his own team to dig up the pipe and install the meter. Always a leader from the front, Chan jumped in the hole to take a shift at digging. When he looked up, his team had fled, and he was facing down the general himself, pointing a gun at his head. In Cambodia in the 90s, consequences for such a high ranking official were unlikely. CHan didn’t give up. He mobilized the local armed police and returned with 20 men to standoff against the general, disconnected him from service and left him out to dry. Chan said this about the dispute:
”He had no water. My office was on the second floor and the general came in with his ten bodyguards to look for me. I said, “ No. You can come here alone, but with an appointment”. He couldn’t do anything. He had to return. He said, “Okay”! At that time we had a telephone, a very big Motorola. He came in to make an appointment for tomorrow. I said, “ Okay, tomorrow you come alone”. So he comes alone, we talk. “Okay. I’ll reconnect on two conditions. The first condition is that you have to sign a commitment saying that you will respect the Water Supply Authority and second, you need to pay a penalty for your bad behavior and you must allow us to broadcast the situation to the public, or no way, no water in your house”. So he agreed. “
….By 2010, coverage in the city went from 25 percent to over 90 percent with 24 hour service. The utility became financially self sustaining and turned a profit. It was listed on the Cambodia Securities Exchange in 2012. Chan won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2006.
By separating the utility company from the low-capacity local government, Ek and PPWSA proved that:
- Functional infrastructure relies on institutional quality and mechanism design.
- State capacity need not exist within the state
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The post A New Order of Things appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
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