Idealism is naive, but what's the alternative?

Last year, I wrote a passionate essay about Why The Oscars Matter.

It was also my second last essay before I stopped writing for a while. There are many reasons for this - most of them circumstantial, some of them cliches. But the Oscar nominations have jolted me out of my stasis. This piece is an attempt to get unstuck - to clear the dust off my keyboard and my mind. Like everyone else, I’ve been grappling with the world’s chaos while rebuilding my own life with love, intention, and a touch of recovery from life’s various endings.

The Oscar nominations are out - and for someone who has never identified with a singular religious denomination, this time of the year is akin to a religious festival to me - as I do worship at the altar of the cinema screen. This year feels especially significant because, after being a passive observer for years, I played an active role in campaigning for my favorite international film of the year - All We Imagine As Light. The film went on to win several awards leading up to the Oscars, and led to the first Indian director (Payal Kapadia), to get a Golden Globe nomination. I knew an Oscar nomination was a moonshot, but one can hope.

Until that hope was shattered by what came next.

Emilia Perez getting thirteen nominations.

Here's the official description of the film:

A Mexican lawyer is offered an unusual job to help a notorious cartel boss retire and transition into living as a woman, fulfilling a long-held desire.

There are plotlines from the Marvel universe which sound more realistic than whatever this is. And yes, this film was directed by a French director. I will not go into the rabbit hole of criticizing the very premise of this film, as the internet is full of that.

This is me processing my disappointment with the idealism I have led with - every Oscar season. Most notably the last one being a year ago.

We live in a world where what we pay attention to is decided by a handful of people. In 1988, Noam Chomsky wrote Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Now, in 2025, we are grappling with Manufactured Taste, Manufactured Opinions, and Manufactured Discontent...And this is precisely the time what we pay attention to matters the most.

For years - at least in my somewhat idealistic world view - the Oscars were insulated from the algorithmic takeover of taste. Algorithms have flattened culture - Kyle Chayka wrote a phenomenal book about it, in case you are interested

This year that belief has been broken. A Netflix movie about a premise which could have been written by ChatGPT has received more nominations for a non english language film ever - beating out Roma and Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon.

While my belief in the Oscars has finally broken - my clinging on to Idealism won't.

There is a scene in All We Imagine As Light, where two lovers finally find some privacy in a cave by the sea side.

They have been separated by religious dogmas and societal stigmas - and this union is something that the film builds up to for the first 90 mins. The woman (Anu) asks her lover (Shiaz) about the future of this seemingly impossible relationship, a very logical intervention during a very emotional scene. Shiaz brushes it off, saying, 'What’s gotten into you today?. A few minutes later however, we discover that he writes these lines on the walls of the cave.

Our love is endless like the sea..
We shall flow with it wherever it takes us...

Hope is a convenient refuge when we can see the light. It's only when the night feels the darkest that we have to hold on to hope the hardest.

What we pay attention to is what we give life to. Earlier this year, I chose to give all my attention to a film about the restorative nature of friendships in the face of life's many flavors of suffering.

I hope you, too, can step away from the algorithmic pull of these screens and truly decide what deserves your attention.

I’ll be back - sooner this time.