When I revisit media from the 00s and 10s, I sometimes wonder why a certain actor or movie didn’t take off. Then when I look up the actor or movie in question, I find that the mainstream critics were overly harsh. The contrast with today’s critics, who wildly over-praise anything with a non-white lead, is pretty stark.
Knowing what we know now about the radical leftist orthodoxy that has dominated these spaces for decades - first in relative secret and now in far more brazen fashion - I sometimes wonder how many good actors and movies were squashed by the critic cartel simply for being white.
I guess I’ve lately started thinking less about all the subversive garbage being made and more about what has been denied us by those who control the levers of power in media. “We should be on Mars” applies to more than just space travel.
There’s probably some crossover with casting couch shenanigans as well. Used to be you assumed an overlooked actor was just someone who didn’t suck the chosen (hehe) dicks. Now being white is enough to deny you access. I guess I’m mostly curious about when the former turned into the latter. Probably a lot longer than we realize.
Sort of a side note: the same thing happened to masculine actors. We had a decent run of convincingly male MCU characters with the OG avengers. Who do they push on us now, though? Manlets like Timothy chalomet and Tom Holland.
That is a very good point. Cavill would’ve been a mega star in the 80s or 90s