How to Demoralize the MAGA Base

A short take

I started my site predicting the Oscars in 1999. I was the first to track the race from the beginning of the year through the Oscar ceremony. My job, as I saw it, was to crack the code. I wanted to know why, for instance, How Green Was My Valley beat Citizen Kane in 1941. Of course, years later I know why, but I didn’t then.

When I first started, the Oscars were still suspenseful and surprising. It wasn’t a massive industry machine controlled by publicists (lobbyists) and pundits (bloggers), but something the entire public cared about. Hollywood made movies for the people because they wanted to make money.

By the end of the year, they would assess which films did best, made the most money, became part of the culture, and earned critical acclaim. Some movies that won require no explanation, like The Godfather or Titanic. But now, you probably couldn't name a single Best Picture winner from the last ten years, or maybe even the last 20, because everything has changed.

Now, the Oscars are “managed” from soup to nuts. Publicists target bloggers at film festivals, who then squire their contenders into the race. The public is barely involved. You can predict whether a movie will win or place without anyone ever seeing it. That’s how fixed a race it is now. A little like politics. Okay, a LOT like politics.

One thing that has probably wrecked the Oscars more than anything else is the pundit game of predicting nominees and winners before the films even open or are seen, based only on pedigree, subject matter, and studio. It’s more likely a film that did well at the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride, or Toronto to find a place than a film that made $100 million.

Over at the site Gold Derby (they “benched” me during my cancellation), pundits and bloggers shape the race so much that maybe one or two will surprise them when the nominations are announced. Best Picture, right now, looks something like this:

The problem with this? The same entity (Penske Eldridge) owns Gold Derby, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Indiewire, Rolling Stone and, wait for it, The Golden Globes. The trades earn most of their money from the studio ads. I did, too, once upon a time, and I was very much a player in this money game.

Now, maybe one or two studios have the courage to advertise on my site. But these other sites, along with many of the blogs that participate on Gold Derby (like The Ankler, Next Best Picture, etc.), are also well paid. We’re talking hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

Gold Derby makes money from studios, so do the pundits predicting the movies, and it all lands happily at the Golden Globes before it ever gets to the Oscars, and by then, the fix is in.

One of the best moments of my 27 years predicting the Oscars is that, in 2024, none of the pundits at Gold Derby had Sean Baker winning the DGA and the Oscar for Anora. None of them. I did. If I’d been on the site, I would have been the only one, and trust me, it’s lonely to be out there on a limb like that. It paid off, or it would have if I wasn’t an ejected pariah.

All of this to say that the pundits were wrong. Really, really wrong. They aren’t measuring anything tangible. It is all imaginary. If you’d looked at the Vegas odds back then, they would be pulling from Gold Derby. They would have been wrong too.

The first and only time I bet on the horse races was on a long shot to win. That was my first lesson in predicting and betting on things you can’t know in advance. I took a guess, and it paid off. When that happens, it’s far more exciting than picking the same winner everyone else has already chosen.

That early lesson always kept a marker in my predictor’s brain that the impossible could actually happen. You can’t always go by groupthink or punditry. Sometimes, you have to go rogue.

Now, ahead of the midterms, I see so much reliance—and handwringing—over the odds at Kalshi and Polymarket on X. But it’s the same thing as Gold Derby or the Vegas odds on the Oscars. I never trust them because the “muggles” have no idea what was going on inside the Oscar race. Their perception is usually about 70% right.

Now, because so many people talk about Kalshi and Polymarket, they’ve almost replaced polls, which are at least rooted in some evidence of what people think. Betting odds are bouncing off those polls, but they've changed how people talk about elections, and, frankly, it’s demoralizing for the losing side.

It also makes people want to, to quote Bob Dylan, “be on the side that’s winning.” If you think one side is winning, you might be more likely to abandon your team and join the other. They might be immune to the polls by now, but not Polymarket or Kalshi. That’s a whole different thing.

Trump has consistently and famously beaten the polls. Every time we head into an election, it feels like he’s underwater and the whole thing will collapse, and even more so this time because he won’t be on the ballot, “Pretend I’m on the ballot,” Trump keeps saying.

We don’t know now how these very close elections will swing. But one thing I do know is that people shouldn't look to Kalshi and Polymarket. They're curiosities at best. They might turn out to be right, but for now, they’re still a whole lotta sound and fury, signifying nothing.