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I don't know about blackmail, but wasn't Hollywood always run on nepotism, connections, and propaganda?
Dafne Keen as the young jedi girl also brought her A game, and Carrie Ann Moss also brought gravitas. Both could work with facial expression, body language and limited dialogue to still bring character and intent.
You know, acting.
A good actor can be a shining gem in a bad script, but it just highlights how shit the script is and how much of a slog it is to get through. Bad actors in bad scripts just become exhausting, and right now there are no good young black actresses. Zoe Saldana and Zendaya are above average but not Halle Berry or Angela Bassett level, and Dominique Tipper is decent but can't do dialogue. Every other young black woman is some flavor of 'repressed racial rage' and can't fucking smile or joke because that's white supremacy or something. (Note: I heard good things about Abbott Elementary so maybe black talent is concentrated in comedy AS USUAL).
The Noticing variable for an enshittified show is a young black woman who don't take no shit from no man. Scifi is especially guilty of this, and thats why Discovery, Acolyte and Obi Wan sucked balls.
Interesting, I just realized the Expanse (which I really enjoyed) subverted this by having that character in the first few episodes, and then having her fall in love with and becoming a supporting partner with the (white male) lead. But then again, the show writers were constrained by the source material so probably they shouldn't get any credit.
Eh, they can get credit. Her name is Naomi Nagata, and could easily have been asian. They got an indian guy to play a texan hick as well, and no one really gave a shit because the series cleaved its racial differences as space palestine vs 2 faraway superpowers. In fantasy all colors of humanity unite to be racist against orcs, and speciecism is more appealing in scifi than racism still.
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Not to the extent that it is now. If you look at biographies for actors and actresses before the 2000s, most of them were nobodies who broke out. Now they’re all some other famous actor’s son or daughter. Directors and producers usually got experience on smaller films or TV and then had one project that got really popular, catapulting them into the big leagues.
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This was my question. If anything I'd assume it was worse in the past, given lack of regulation and transparency.
There has been an exponential increase in nepo-babies though, which is in a way only natural as time goes on and the industry grew but it also shows the lack of meritocratic guardrails in the industry.
Maybe there's a synthesis here: Hollywood did use to be pretty corrupt and nepotistic in a way that everyone knew about, but now it's corrupt and nepotistic in a different way we're not aware of.
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