Once in a generation, America faces a great moral question that can only be answered by Hollywood.

For example, in the 1980s, liberals were all about AIDS, so Hollywood eventually took up that great cause and gave us the gay Forrest Gump in the movie "Philadelphia" (1993), in which Tom Hanks, the Jimmy Stewart of his day, the beloved actor of 1980s comedies like "Splash," "Turner & Hooch," and "Big," made an entire generation of liberals gay.

A few years ago, a film like 'Nickel Boys' would have been a shoo-in. Back in the year of Our Floyd 2020, this kind of stuff brought liberals to their knees — literally.

Everyone knew this was their moral duty, their path to progress, because Denzel Washington, the symbol of morality in lots of movies of that time, became gay with Tom Hanks. Black and white were reconciled, and America’s racial strife was over. It was all about civil rights. Everyone accordingly won Oscars, including Bruce Springsteen, for “Streets of Philadelphia:” The Boss also turned gay. That entire era was one big "South Park" episode.

What’s harder to figure out is who gets the last laugh.

Pyhrric victory

After a generation of struggle, the oh-so-serious liberals were on top. In 2015, the Obergefell decision turned America into the gay marriage capital of the world, the San Francisco of the solar system, if you will, repealing every constitutional amendment about marriage in every state, about 31 of them. The majority lost, the Constitution lost, everyone was re-educated.

Hollywood and the media had never been more powerful. Or so we thought.

Ten years on, however, it seems that the price liberals paid for those victories was losing the American audience. As far as the 2025 Oscars are concerned, it’s still one big "South Park" episode, but nobody's tuning in.

Perhaps precisely for that reason, Hollywood has become even more strident in its progressive tastemaking. Competing for Best Picture this year are two titans of transgender triumphalism: "Conclave" and "Emilia Perez." We haven't seen such hype since Jake Paul faced off against Iron Mike.

Catholics vs. cartel

How to decide which deserves the honor more? Is it "Emilia Perez" — a musical about a Hitler-loving Mexican cartel gangster who loses his testicles in order to find himself? Or is it "Conclave," in which Muslims bomb the Vatican in order to pave the way for the first pope with ovaries? Truly this is a matter only the most sophisticated of cineastes are equipped to judge.

These fantasies about "transing" such redoubts of toxic masculinity as the Catholic Church (the magisterium is decidedly hetero, even if its guardians sometimes aren't) and the global drug trade reveal the impressive ambition that led liberals in the Obama and Biden years to try to turn Afghanistan into a feminist utopia.

But this sweeping vision of empire does not preclude a focus on more local matters. Should the pope be transgender, pre- or post-op, hermaphroditic, or intersex? "Conclave" presents us with this bewildering variety of options for self-identification, revealing the true freedom that 21st-century left-wing thought can achieve!

The return of Big Mike?

Trans womanhood is now the height of Hollywood glamor. What next — a trans Madam President? Talk about Oscar bait! And the story writes itself. Or rather, Twitter trolls already wrote it, with their speculations that Michelle Obama started out as "Big Mike."

Somehow the great right-wing digital brain predicted the future, as it so often does. There's a name for this heuristic: The funniest timeline wins.

But Hollywood is now stuck with a contest between oppressed groups that don’t have much in common beyond this: They ferociously reject most Americans. Obviously, they cannot all win, and they cannot all get enough attention to justify their moral demands in either urgency or intensity. But can they all lose?

Bum 'Nickel'

I’ve focused on the two transgender movies so far, but if you look at the rest of the Best Picture nominees, there is, of course, also the mandatory movie about racism, civil rights, the 1960s, and unjust imprisonment of talented, scholarly young black men.

A few years ago, a film like "Nickel Boys" would have been a shoo-in. Back in the year of Our Floyd 2020 (when the Colson Whitehead novel "Nickel Boys" is based on won the Pulitzer), this kind of stuff brought liberals to their knees — literally.

But now? Nobody's seen it, and the liberal press can barely be bothered to praise it. Can you blame them? Trans is clearly the front-running Current Thing, so why risk dissent? In 2024, liberals seemed to make all the wrong choices when it came to which narratives to push, and so it is only natural that they'd start to doubt their instincts a little.

Sheer persistence

The rest of the list features at least four different varieties of feminism. "Anora" reinvents the rom-com as the crazy, audacious adventure of a lady of negotiable affections who walks all over a sensitive male figure who is the son of a Russian oligarch, so hijinks ensue. Heroic “sex work” might be a new possibility for the 21st-century liberal!

"The Substance" — by far the cleverest of these gynocentric delights — takes aim at Hollywood's dependence on plastic surgery via the body horror of displaying Demi Moore's naturally aged 60-something naked body. Here the future is indeed female — but only for those females ruthless enough to seize it from their physical inferiors.

"Wicked" adds some unasked-for black-girl magic to "The Wizard of Oz." The strain of convincing audiences that they wanted this led to the creepiest media campaign in award season memory — spots in which co-stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande fawned over each other like a pair of praying mantises.

Then there's the good, old-fashioned trauma feminism of "I'm Still Here." The only foreign film nominated for Best Picture, "I'm Still Here" is a reminder of the liberal maxim that every time a man is murdered, the real problem is who suffers because of this. A Brazilian politician is abducted by a military junta — and it's based on a true story? By all means, let's focus on his wife's ordeal. Sheer female persisting has never been so cinematic.

It's worth noting that behind the camera here is Brazilian director Walter Salles, a billionaire heir of a banking empire best known for making an adoring Che Guevara biopic 20 years ago. A good reminder that Hamas is only the latest terrorist group liberals adore in the form of kitschy art; a good reminder, too, that behind their sentimentality lies brutality.

Rounding out the competition is a classic crowd-pleasing Holocaust movie. In "The Brutalist," the protagonist survives the brutality of the camps only to inflict it — in architectural form — on America.

Chalamet charm

So much for the serious contenders in this year's oppression Olympics. The other two contenders are worth mentioning only for their artistic merit.

James Mangold's Bob Dylan biopic, "A Complete Unknown," is better than all the others put together, as is Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" sequel. Both are forms of 1960s nostalgia, and both show us, in nascent form, the forces that got us radical feminism and gender ideology and the like: the frenzied, middle-class quest for an authentic "identity" to give them a leg up in the endless competition for the spotlight.

Both those movies also star the same actor, Timothee Chalamet, the Leonardo DiCaprio of this generation, a favorite of women, a heartthrob who treats them like a combination of all-you-can-eat buffet and harem. He seems to be the only actor allowed in Hollywood to be sort of cool or even a little on the heroic side. But of course, even when he’s leading a jihad, the last word has to go to the woman who is dissatisfied with him and chooses atheism over marriage. It’s 2025.