Gina Carano Stans Trying to Destroy the Oscars?
The Academy's YouTube page is in shambles
So there I was on YouTube, looking at the recommended videos for me, and I see a video called "MINARI | Scene at the Oscars." Well, that's perfect because I just recently saw Minari and liked it, so I'd love to see what Oscar promotional material they are putting out. I click on the video, and I'm about thirty seconds into the lush images southern farm life when I notice something odd: The like-to-dislike ratio on the video is 237 to 138.
While many videos online attract unwarranted hate, this is unusual for many reasons. Minari is generally a well regarded film, the Oscars YouTube page should attract film fans prone to liking this type of movie more than others, and there's nothing inherently divisive about the content of film, unlike its more politically inclined awards rivals like Promising Young Woman or Da 5 Bloods. So naturally, I went to the source of almost all YouTube discourse, the comments section, and it was there that I found more questions than answers.
Only one of the top five comments sorted as "Top Comments" actually referred to the film directly in any way. The others appeared to be fueled with anger, using current popular phrases and buzzwords like "Gina [Carano]" and "Harvey Weinstein" and "cancel culture." But the comment that stuck with me was one referring to "KK's video." I wasn't sure what to do with that, so I decided to dig into the other Scene at The Academy videos to find out if this was a recurring issue.
While some videos suffered worse than others, the pervading feeling among the comments became clear "#FireKathleenKennedy." At this point, I understood what was going on. People bombarded the Oscars YouTube videos in order to protest the firing of Gina Carano from the Disney+ series The Mandalorian for her social media presence, culminating in her sharing an image from WWII Germany with the caption: "Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…. even by children. :( 'Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?'"
While support for Gina Carano has been vocal since her firing over a month ago, the Oscars has had nothing to do with the situation. However, I kept scrolling down their videos page until I found what I was looking for: A video featuring Kathleen Kennedy talking at the Academy's Scientific and Technical Awards about Laurie Atkin, the first female technical award recipient, and the progress women are making in film industry science. Likes/Dislikes and comments have been disabled for this video.
At that moment, it was clear what happened. Kathleen Kennedy was already a divisive figure at Lucasfilm, but less than a week after Gina Carano's firing, an act many of her supporters attribute to Kennedy, she had a target on her back. Thus, upon one of Kennedy's first public appearances since the incident, the mob came down on her hard. According to Bounding Into Comics, the day after the video was posted, it had been viewed over 24,000 times with 6,000 dislikes and only 72 likes. Therefore, it makes sense why the operators of the Oscars YouTube channel would mute the video's responses. It also makes sense why Carano fans and Kennedy haters would not take kindly to this supposed silencing.
All the videos posted after the Kennedy video have been attacked, even those uploaded nearly a full month later, and many of the videos posted before, especially other 2021 Scientific and Technical Awards videos, have seen their numbers trending negatively. However, on the Oscars's other social media pages, there is no mention of hate toward Kathleen Kennedy, except a stray comment here and there on its Facebook and Twitter pages.
What all this means for the Oscars, especially with this year's nominations being announced via livestream on YouTube in less than 12 hours, is uncertain. What this means for society at large is that the war of cancel culture is growing in intensity, and its opposers are loud and ready to fight.
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Sam Pinnelas
Not born in a log cabin on a not stormy not night...
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