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The monoculture is dead, The Hollywood Reporter claims. Its evidence? No one watches the Oscars anymore. An article over the weekend, \u201cThe Last Time Everyone Watched the Same Thing,\u201d highlighted the last moment everyone shared: a selfie that Bradley Cooper took at the 2014 Oscars, which instantly became the most widely-shared Tweet ever.<\/p>\n
More than 43 million people witnessed that act of elite digital solipsism. But we should be asking: Does an iPhone snapshot that includes Ellen DeGeneres and Kevin Spacey really indicate some sort of peak? Or was it so self-absorbed and off-putting that it actually hastened a cultural shift? Whether consciously or not at the time, Americans saw that moment and thought, \u201cThis is bullsh*t<\/i>.\u201d After all, the number-one show at the time was The Big Bang Theory, <\/i>which had something like 23 million weekly viewers, a sitcom about geniuses, but made for dumb people, or at least people that Hollywood thought were dumb. Good riddance, and don\u2019t let the door hit you in the bazinga on the way out.<\/p>\n
Look at what happened when Hollywood took one last stab at uniting us all when COVID hit. That was the age of Tiger King<\/i>, a terrible documentary reality show that baked its own obsolescence into its premise. Sure, everyone watched it, but only because public entities and massive peer pressure terrified them into staying indoors.<\/p>\n
But the ultimate mask-off moment occurred with Gal Gadot\u2019s \u201cImagine\u201d video, which just celebrated its sixth birthday. It was the cringiest thing ever created: entitled celebrities singing a dated folk song while normal people grieved the losses of loved ones, their jobs, or their regular daily routines. That was just the start of the 2020 crap parade, the worst cultural period in global history, which featured charity cast \u201ctable reads\u201d of 1980s comedies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High<\/i> and a video of Katy Perry singing \u201cBaby Mine\u201d from Dumbo <\/i>while dressed in an elephant costume. Faced with this tsunami of garbage, people watched reruns of Columbo <\/i>and Friends <\/i>instead and said, \u201cTake this monoculture and shove it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The traditional pipeline stopped producing. Our entertainment became YouTube and Instagram videos of people cooking stuff they\u2019d found in the garbage. And it was fine.<\/p>\n
Then again, maybe the article\u2019s entire premise is flawed. The \u201cmonoculture\u201d might actually still exist. It\u2019s just that old metrics, like Nielsen ratings and box office grosses, don\u2019t tell the whole story. The Hollywood Reporter <\/i>mentions Stranger Things, <\/i>but what about Squid Game<\/i>? Or Mr. Beast? The Minecraft <\/i>movie was a massive cultural phenomenon, as were the Super Mario Bros. <\/i>films. If the monoculture is dead, then how did KPop Demon Hunters <\/i>take over the Oscars this year?<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s not denigrate the traditional monoculture era. It brought us Back to the Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, Cheers, <\/i>the golden age of The Simpsons, Yo! MTV Raps<\/i>, Seinfeld, Thriller, Legally Blonde, <\/i>and many other entertainment products serving infinite pleasure. All that material is still out there, swirling around, and much of it is still watchable and good. Young people still listen to \u201980s music and know what a flux capacitor is; they can still pick Donkey Kong out of a police lineup. It\u2019s just that we\u2019re not all watching the same thing all the time. As the title of an Oscar-winning movie \u2014 which was not <\/i>part of the monoculture \u2014 goes, it\u2019s everything, everywhere, all at once.<\/p>\n
Besides, we don\u2019t all need to be watching the same thing. The era when 90 million or so people saw BJ say \u201cGoodbye\u201d to Hawkeye on M.A.S.H.<\/i> is more distant from today\u2019s reality than V-J Day was from the 1970s. It has no relevance. Our world is more atomized, more diverse, and less dependent on traditional gatekeepers than ever. Maybe the death of the monoculture is a good thing. Imagine.<\/p>\n
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