{"id":536326,"date":"2026-01-23T05:38:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T05:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/536326\/"},"modified":"2026-01-23T05:38:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T05:38:12","slug":"sorry-maga-turns-out-people-still-like-woke-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/536326\/","title":{"rendered":"Sorry MAGA, Turns Out People Still Like \u2018Woke\u2019 Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

As this year\u2019s Oscar<\/a> nominations rolled out this morning, I told my boyfriend that Sinners, with 16 noms in total, had made history. \u201cWoke is back,\u201d he replied.<\/p>\n

He was joking (don\u2019t come for him!), but his quip highlights a pretty stark dichotomy. Last year, as everyone from President Donald Trump<\/a> down harped on about the perils of DEI, the biggest cultural breakthroughs\u2014Sinners, KPop Demon Hunters, Heated Rivalry, One Battle After Another\u2014all showcased diversity in fresh ways. And it succeeded. These works weren\u2019t just popular among leftists or critics, they were bona fide cultural phenomena.<\/p>\n

Sinners, a horror movie set in the Jim Crow South, used vampires as a metaphorical device<\/a> to explore systemic racism and cultural theft\u2014and director Ryan Coogler scored a feat in his deal with Warner Bros. that gives him the rights to the film in 25 years. KPop Demon Hunters, a story by a female Korean-Canadian director who\u2019d been waiting over a decade for her chance to direct a feature, placed a huge emphasis on authenticity and brought the already-massive subculture around K-pop<\/a> even more into the mainstream. Heated Rivalry, a small Canadian television production picked up by HBO, had an extremely subversive take on hockey<\/a> by chronicling the horny-yet-poignant love story between two closeted pro players. And One Battle After Another\u2014decried<\/a> by conservative commentators who felt it lionized left-wing violence\u2014offered complicated views on motherhood and activism while skewering ICE-like agent Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw and his desperate attempts to fit in with other racists.<\/p>\n

In a year when the White House issued multiple executive orders doing away with DEI programs in the federal government, the successes of those projects felt like a form of resistance. Corporate media followed Trump\u2019s suit, with Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon, Paramount Global, and Disney all reportedly scaling back<\/a> on their diversity efforts. Skydance, founded by David Ellison, son of billionaire Trump supporter Larry Ellison, acquired Paramount, which briefly removed<\/a> Jimmy Kimmel from the air due to his joke about Charlie Kirk supporters and gave CBS News a seemingly conservative makeover. Meanwhile, shows<\/a> that offered red meat in the form of farmers, grumpy MAGA adherents, cowboys, and Christian values were greenlit and promoted.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a feeling from … this administration that the only stories that matter are stories of straight white men, and that is just simply not the case,\u201d says Jenni Werner, executive artistic director of the New Harmony Project, which develops theater, film, and TV projects and says it is committed to anti-oppressive and anti-racist values.<\/p>\n

\u201cAudiences want to feel transformed. You want to be able to sit down and watch something, whether it’s in your home or in a theater, that takes you into a new place and maybe gives you a new understanding of something.\u201d She adds that she has faith that artists will keep making \u201cboundary-pushing work,\u201d even if it keeps getting harder.<\/p>\n

Even before Trump\u2019s second term, trying to get out-of-the-box stories made in Hollywood has been a slog. According to UCLA\u2019s Hollywood Diversity Report<\/a>, released in December, nearly 80 percent of directors of theatrical movies in 2024 were white, along with about 75 percent of leading actors.<\/p>\n

The report also suggests this discrepancy is leaving money on the table, noting that BIPOC moviegoers \u201cwere overrepresented as ticket buyers for films that had casts of more than 20 percent BIPOC.\u201d Sinners grossed $368 million at the box office, a feat that puts it in the \u201chorror hall of fame,\u201d per The New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As this year\u2019s Oscar nominations rolled out this morning, I told my boyfriend that Sinners, with 16 noms…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":536327,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,1033,12514,171,1020,53,15801,80,173,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-536326","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-diversity","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-film","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-oscars","16":"tag-politics","17":"tag-tv","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-unitedstates","20":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115942804826422718","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/536327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}