Another day, another opportunity for intersectional whining on the op-ed page of The New York Times. In this case, an Asian film critic can’t bring himself to celebrate the incredible Oscar Best Picture win for the South Korean film Parasite — truly an excellent movie (I saw it on the plane last week) — even though it was the first-ever Best Picture victory for a foreign-made film:

But I’m hesitant to give too much credit to the academy for its sudden interest in “inclusion.”

Caught in the middle are Asian-Americans. For many of us, our great hope for representation at the Oscars wasn’t “Parasite,” it was Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell,” about a young Asian-American woman who at a time of personal crisis is confronted with the widening cultural gulf between herself and her parents and grandmother. Alas, “The Farewell,” despite finding popular success and recognition at the Golden Globes and the Film Independent Spirit Awards,garnered no Oscar nominations. I find its exclusion a better indicator of how not just Asian-Americans but also female directors are still seen in Hollywood.

OK, so the wrong Asian film won Best Picture. Got it.

A reader wrote the morning after the Oscars:

Was reading the NYT Oscars coverage. Was a bit taken a back at how much “diversity and inclusion” was considered newsworthy and neutral for its own sake. The reporting is fine I suppose, but there are lots of percentages of the number of white, male, etc. participants and what the Oscars are doing to expand their diversity and inclusion. This not in an article about this issue specifically but in the home page, main reporting piece on the Oscars. Sign of the times.

He’s right. It’s so strange. We can’t simply be allowed to revel in the fact that a wonderful South Korean film won Best Picture, in a triumph for terrific storytelling. We have to racialize it, and frame the victory as something that comes at the cost of white people — though remember, this is a progressive narrative, so it’s good to think that this is happening at the expense of white people, not bad, like your Uncle Bubba thinks. Times story:

In honoring the film, which also won best director, original screenplay and international feature, voters managed to simultaneously embrace the future — Hollywood’s overreliance on white stories told by white filmmakers may finally be ebbing — and remain reverential to decades-old tradition: Unlike some other best-picture nominees, “Parasite” was given a conventional release in theaters. It has taken in $35.5 million at the North American box office since its release in October. Global ticket sales stand at $165 million.

“White stories told by white filmmakers”? For one thing, what makes a story a “white” story? The story in Parasite is a universal one, told in a Korean setting. It’s about a wily working-class family exploiting the anxieties of a wealthy family to take advantage of them. What’s Korean about the story is its language and its setting, but this well-told story is universally human, which is why it’s so accessible.

For another thing, do you think we will ever see the day when the Times opines, in a news story, about Hollywood’s “overreliance on black stories told by black filmmakers,” or “overreliance on Jewish stories told by Jewish filmmakers,” and so forth?

For a third thing: what is the Times‘s reckoning on the right degree of reliance on “white stories told by white filmmakers”? How will the Times know when Hollywood is underrelying on white stories told by white filmmakers? If it can’t say, maybe it’s not a good idea to write like a lazy progressive.

This story reminded me of that time in the 1970s, when I was over at a friend’s house playing, and overheard his father watching Sanford & Son in the next room, and complaining that “all the funniest shows on TV are n—er shows.” The man went on to complain that black people were overrepresented on TV, even as it offended him that the programs that made him laugh the most were about black people. Somehow, I don’t think the Times would find the race-consciousness of that Southern-fried Archie Bunker affirmative. But then, as the woke come to discover, some people who evaluate arts and entertainment primarily in racial terms are Good Racists.

This news story goes on — and remember, this is the main news account of Oscar night, not a sidebar:

The celebration of “Parasite” follows a year in which Oscar voters seemed to retrench toward their conservative past. In a choice that prompted immediate blowback — from, among others, the director Spike Lee, who threw up his hands in frustration and started to walk out of the theater — the academy gave the 2019 best-picture Oscar to “Green Book,” a segregation-era buddy film. While admired by some as a feel-good depiction of people uniting against the odds, the movie was criticized by others as woefully retrograde and borderline bigoted.

Without the victory for “Parasite,” it was a rather poor year for inclusion at the Oscars. The academy barely avoided another #OscarsSoWhite debacle by nominating Cynthia Erivo (“Harriet”) for best actress. (She lost to Renée Zellweger for “Judy.”) Once again, all of the nominees for best director were men, despite it having been a banner year for female filmmakers.

Et cetera. The Times is obsessed with identity politics, of course. You might be thinking, it’s The New York Times, what do you expect? You would be right, in one sense, but in another, you would be quite wrong to be so dismissive. The Times is both bellwether and leader of elite cultural opinion. That the Times is aggressively racializing its coverage like this, and framing the presence of whites in filmmaking as some sort of moral failing, is an indicator of where we are headed as a culture. As I have been saying for years about race-conscious progressives: you are summoning up demons you will not be able to control.

Anyway, I hate this. I didn’t see all the Oscar Best Picture nominees, but I did see Parasite, and I was thrilled that it won because it’s such a clever and incisive film. It is, of course, significant that a foreign-language film won Best Picture, but I hate the way the Times coverage diminishes the artistic meaning of the movie’s victory by making it seem like a form of tokenism. That is not the intention, of course, but when you impose an identity-politics lens on every damn thing, it’s unavoidable.