The Oscars and the Aesthetics of Cringe

(aka The Phrase “White Innocence” Is Redundant)

The day after the Oscars I woke up to a series of texts from a friend:

“Why do the Oscars always feel like a cult?!?!” 

“Brendan Fraser whaaaaat?!”

“Michelle Yeoh saying her Oscar is ‘beacon of hope’ I CANTTTTT”

Then I opened Instagram and saw that many Asian American artists and writers whose work I admire were gushing about the seven wins of Everything Everywhere All At Once, and many queer people and queer news accounts that I follow were posting similar stuff. All were perseverating about how revolutionary this was, historic, radical, how it has changed the future, and indeed the world. Here, I’m supposed to write one of those sentences that goes something like: “As a queer Asian American, I [felt something about this that’s seemingly accordant to my identity demographics and which seemingly matters in a political way],” but all I can write is that, as a queer Asian American, I cringe. Sure, I like that movie and, yeah, I audibly sobbed four times in the theater during it and, of course, I am glad a movie like this got made and rewarded on a huge scale—but, and, also, I resent that movie for making something stupid count as deep, for being a crayon drawing made by two teenage boys that the whole world now calls profound. What I’m cringing at is how sometimes crayon drawings can be profound, and that this means what we need and want from our art is gooey and foolish a lot of the time. What I’m cringing at is how telling ourselves in our art platitudes of the sort that our therapists tell us—it’s going to be okay, you deserve love, oh no life is hard but hey it’s also beautiful—which EEAAO is teeming with, are what, at this moment and pretty much always, make society feel better about the most doomed aspects of our political condition. (1)