The anti-Trumpian Oscars

If there's something I admire more than the Oscars being willing to reconsider core elements of their delivery system, it's the Oscars admitting when they were wrong -- and doing something about it.

This week it came out that the new category of "best popular film," which had only been announced a month earlier, has been shitcanned.

That's my term. Theirs was "in need of further discussion."

Officially, the idea was that the announcement of the award well into the release season of the first films to qualify for it would handicap those films.

That's transparently bullshit, but I don't mind it as a face-saving move. I mean, it indicates that films would be made differently if they knew they were aspiring for this Oscar. Which is nonsense.

The point isn't what they give as a reason. The point is that they heard the massive volume of backlash and they're doing something about it. And that they obviously admit the idea was a bad idea.

It's something Donald Trump would never do.

Trump has flip-flopped on his positions on things, sure. But he's fundamentally unwilling or unable to acknowledge that those flip flops constitute a change of his original position, or even that they are flip flops. You can't confront Trump with logic or evidence. Don't even try.

Trump believes if you admit you were wrong about something it weakens you. In fact, it has recently come out that he privately fumes over the fact that he had to condemn the hate groups from Charlottesville after initially being unwilling to do so. Even that he viewed as an admission of incorrectness. Boy, what a stand-up guy we have as a president.

Anyway, this post does not exist to dump on Trump. It exists to praise the Oscars.

It had to have been a hard decision to reverse course on an announcement that isn't even as old as some of the perishables in your refrigerator. Given that this institution is approaching a century in age itself, you know a ton of research and debate went into this. You don't make an announcement of a new Oscar category on a lark. You probably even market test it among what you think of as a representative sample of the type of responses you are going to get on Twitter, though I don't know what body that would be.

But it was a colossal misjudgment. Instead of riding this misjudgment into oblivion, as someone like Trump would do, they just said "We were wrong." And poof! It's not something we have to worry about anymore. At least, not in 2019.

If only more of our leaders could be like the Oscars.