[guest post by JVW]

Deadline reports:

It was a historic 92nd Academy Awards with a first Best Picture recipient not in the English language in Parasite adding an element of surprise to a largely predictable winners list. There was something historic in the ratings for the 2020 Oscars too — a historic low.

[. . .]

[T]he ceremony, which clocked in at 3 hours and 36 minutes — up from 3 hours, 23 minutes in 2019 — could not repeat last year’s ratings turnaround, drawing 23.6 million total viewers and a 5.3 rating in the adults 18-49 demographic, based on Nielsen’s Live+Same Day Fast National ratings ordered by ABC. That is down sharply, -20% in viewers and -31% in the demo ,from last year’s 29.6 million viewers and a 7.7 adults 18-49 rating. It also is down double-digits from the Oscars’ previous smallest audience, 26.5 million in 2018.

Overall, the Oscars was the most watched entertainment special since last year’s ceremony, topping the Grammy Awards and Golden Globes in total viewers. Other broadcast networks didn’t try to compete Sunday, with all airing repeats.

The Academy of Motion Pictures, its fans, and ABC will probably be quick to blame the phenomenon of “cutting the cord” and streaming content over the Internet for the decline in ratings, but that alone can’t explain a one-fifth drop in viewership since last year. And sure, not having a superhero movie nominated — no, I’m not going to count The Joker — might have turned off a certain type of viewer. But will any honest voices in Tinseltown give consideration to the hard question of whether the predictably smug left-wing politics on display every single year is turning off casual viewers?

You would think that a group of multi-millionaires (and some billionaires) could congregate for one night to celebrate achievement in their industry without resorting to the shallow virtue-signaling of their complete wokey-woke-wokeness, but you would be wrong.

[UPDATE] – Made a post-publication edit to the headline to add the words “Oscar Ratings” so that the topic of the post is immediately clear.

[UPDATE II] – This cracks me up. During the Oscar telecast, Natalie Portman’s cape featuring the embroidered names of women directors who had not been nominated for an Academy Award made the rounds. One observer pointed out a slight contradiction between Ms. Portman’s woke feminism and her own actions:

Natalie Portman’s production company has only ever hired 1 female director (her name was Natalie Portman) https://t.co/DRUVM1oezW

— Angela Morabito (@AngelaLMorabito) February 11, 2020

I looked it up because I was afraid it was too good to be true, but she’s right: IMDB lists Natalie Portman as a producer on ten different movies — six times as an executive producer to boot — yet zero of those movies feature a female director. The IMDB page for her production company has only one of eleven films directed by a woman, Ms. Portman herself. But hey, virtue was signaled.

– JVW

You never know who will actually perform well, of course. A lot of Democrats got too clever by half and hoped Donald Trump would be the GOP nominee in 2016. But Sanders has some major baggage, and Democrats would do well to heed it. Because if they pick Bernie, they are likely to lose. Gabriel Schoenfeld explains:

When Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his minions seized dozens of American hostages in 1979 and held 52 of them for 444 days, Americans across the spectrum were united in outrage and in seeking their safe return. Sanders, at the time, was a backer of an obscure Marxist-Leninist political party that pledged support for the Iranian theocracy and defended the hostage-taking. In line with Iranian propaganda, the party alleged that the captured diplomats and other U.S. Embassy workers were likely CIA agents.

This at the very moment when those Americans were being abused and tortured for precisely that charge.

. . . .

Trump, who has made challenging the Iranian theocracy a centerpiece of his foreign policy, is going to have a field day with this single item. “Crazy Bernie” is his stupid moniker for Sanders. Unfortunately, it has genuine substance to back it.

If support for this group was a completely isolated moment from Sanders’ past, perhaps somehow he could get away from it by calling it a youthful indiscretion. The trouble is, however, that he was in his late 30s at the time. Moreover, he has never addressed this chapter of his past to explain how and why and when his views have changed. Nor was it a one-off. Whatever Sanders says now, at a moment when he is trying to compete in the American mainstream, he has made a lifelong career of ingratiating himself with anti-American radicals of various left-wing stripes.

The same way Donald Trump has never met a murderous dictator he didn’t like, Bernie Sanders has never met a left-wing dictator he didn’t like. As the piece notes, “from Cuba’s Fidel Castro to Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega of Sandinista fame,” Sanders has supported them all. After honeymooning in the Soviet Union, he gushed that “there are some things that (the Soviet Union does) better than we do and which were, in fact, quite impressive. Subway systems in Moscow costs 5 kopecs — or 7 cents. Faster, cleaner, more attractive and more efficient than any in the U.S. — and cheap.”

I’m not sure I could vote for Bernie over Donald Trump. I might have to sit that one out. But my vote doesn’t matter. The point is that other Americans scared by Bernie’s record would likely vote for Trump. If defeating Donald Trump is one of the most important issues to the Democrats — and it should be — choosing Bernie Sanders is political suicide.

What follows is exclusive footage (MUST CREDIT PATTERICO!!1!) of New Hampshire Democrat primary voters.