Around two weeks ago, Stephen King received considerable social media backlash for tweeting that he only considered quality in art, rather than diversity. A perfectly fine thing to say and something I wholly agree with. Of course, King, ever the faux-wokester, then tried to further elaborate in subsequent tweets that what he meant to say was that an individual’s background should not distract from their odds at winning an award. That didn’t calm down the mob as who else but “When They See Us” creator Ava DuVernay went on to criticize King’s tweet as “backward and ignorant.”
King could have just left it at that, stood by his own beliefs and moved along, but today my respect for the legendary novelist has severely dwindled thanks to a Washington Post column in which the author argued the Oscars were still “rigged in favor of white people.”
in his WaPo column King criticized Oscars’ Best Picture nominees, including “The Irishman,” “Ford v Ferrari,” “1917,” “Joker,” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” as “man-fiction” that had plenty of “fights, guns, and many white faces.” Amd then, to make matters worse, King went on to champion DuVernay’s uber-overrated Netflix series “When They See Us” as the work of “creative genius” in his Washington Post column.
Was this King Op-Ed a cowardly act of intellectual harakiri? You bet.