This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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I have a confession to make: Even as a certified conservative, I miss loving the Oscars. I miss the anticipation of those Sunday nights. I miss the domestic clatter of it — the clanging of dishes in the kitchen, the gathering of popcorn, the descent into the basement to park myself before the glow of the television. I miss the shared post-mortem with my mother, dissecting hemlines and styling choices, simply admiring the objective beauty of the spectacle.

Mostly, I miss loving what it celebrated: actors working at the top of their craft, called into a vocation with a unique sway over the human heart. Men and women tasked with reminding us of the dignity of the human experience — making us, especially as children, yearn for experiences we’d not yet had, feelings we’d had no occasion to feel. Actors reminding us that beauty exists, pointing us to its source, and ultimately helping people make meaning of their own stories within the ultimate one.

The Hollywood class still believes the Oscars matter to the public in this way. They are sadly mistaken. The country stopped tuning in years ago.

In 1998, when the ceremony was still a shared national ritual and “Titanic” swept the board, 57 million of us watched. Through the early 2000s, broadcasts often drew over 40 million viewers; even into the 2010s, over 30 million was common. By 2021, however, the ceremony had hit an all-time low of 10.4 million. Despite a modest rebound lately to roughly 19-20 million, the audience remains a ghost of its former self. Hollywood’s “national event” now resonates almost exclusively within Hollywood.

The box office tells the same story. Many of this year’s nominees barely register as movies you’d actually go see on a Saturday night. Among the 2026 Best Picture contenders, a few grossed modestly well: “F1,” “Sinners,” and “One Battle After Another.” Most others were tiny in comparison: “Bugonia” has grossed around $40 million and “Sentimental Value” $22 million worldwide. Several played only at festivals or in limited art-house runs. These movies, praised in niche circles, were largely invisible to the rest of the country.

Even when the ceremony pulls 20 million viewers, it is not America in the round. The audience skews older, wealthier, and disproportionately coastal; Los Angeles, New York, and other urban markets register above the national average. Many younger Americans aren’t interested at all. This is a cluster of affluent, urban viewers watching a show that reflects their own tastes and values — a clear marker of the gulf between Middle America and the coasts. The Great Divide in black tie.

Why? Why have the Oscars become so siloed, watched mostly by an older, affluent, coastal audience while the rest of the country looks outward, upward, anywhere else? I believe it comes down to what we choose to celebrate. I’m not talking about the applause when winners wade up the stairs in heels and floor-length gowns. I mean everything else: the movies themselves, and the values embedded in them.

The divide runs deeper than taste. It’s a question of what art is for. The late philosopher Roger Scruton wrote often of beauty as the form through which the sacred manifests itself to us. He warned that art fails when it abandons beauty for provocation alone.

He was onto something. Too many Oscar favorites today have stopped prizing cinematic beauty or harmony of form. Instead, they prize “perceived importance” — trauma-laden narratives, abrasive aesthetics, and a certain grim moral instruction. The numbers tell the story of a public that feels lectured rather than lifted. According to a recent Rasmussen report, 54% of Americans believe movies have gotten worse over the past two decades, while only 27% say they’ve improved. Hollywood is delivering lectures instead of entertainment and wondering why half the country has stopped watching.

“Assumed liberalism,” a term I leaned heavily on in theater school, runs through host monologues, speeches, and acceptance remarks alike. Americans with differing worldviews — the majority of the country, it turns out — must sift through leftist jargon just to figure out who won Best Picture. As Ross Douthat puts it, the Oscars have become a “boutique affair for American liberals,” a ceremony prioritizing social commentary and niche arthouse films over popular, mainstream cinema. It is also, in his words, a “venue for liberal soapboxing,” where ideology is celebrated as artistry, and the rest of the country is largely left out.

Of course, there are other culprits. Short-form media has fractured our attention; the pandemic bruised the theater-going habit; streaming platforms have made us all shut-ins. But those are the mechanics of the decline, not the heart of it. The heart of the problem is what the Oscars now define as worthy of our attention. The result is a cultural echo chamber — a narrow slice of Americans celebrating messages that resonate little beyond their own zip codes.

Some conservatives are happy about this; vindictive, even. I don’t count myself among them. The country needs these silly, glittering nights more than we like to admit — moments when we can look at the stars and see something of ourselves in them: our dignity, our aspirations, and our common story.

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Grace Salvatore is senior editor of media, arts, and culture for Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Restoring the West and a contributor to Independent Women’s Voice.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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I’m a social media influencer fighting for the same clicks as everyone else. But every post I put on social media is for people who aren’t even on it. Four of them, to be exact. My kids.

In our house, homework, backyard football, theater rehearsal, and bargaining over bedtime are what trend. The kids’ only “follower” is our French bulldog. They’re too young to be on social media. Thank God! But someday they’ll type my name into the internet and see the evidence I left behind. When that day comes, I hope they find something useful.

That awareness shapes every post I send into the world. I’m not running a social media account so much as I’m managing a legacy. Every father desires to leave something behind, and while I got photo albums, my kids are getting a searchable record. 

My content celebrates faith, family, and freedom — otherwise known as the “culture war.” And I’ve quickly learned how seriously people take the “war” part. Since I defend conservative ideas, some might say I cover “politics.” And social media is important because I started this platform to defend those values in public. 

But here’s the distinction. The dominant — viral — style of political social media is humiliation, sarcasm, character assassination, and outrage. The algorithm rewards these behaviors because they produce engagement. But I’m no servant to the algorithm.

I try not to play in the mud. That doesn’t mean avoiding conflict. I embrace it! But it does mean avoiding the kind of cruelty that has become the dominant style online. The internet doesn’t lack for volunteers looking to destroy others. I attack ideas, not people. I make arguments instead of insults. I try to be respectful even while being direct.

Sadly, this is rare in political discourse. Some believe if you’re not disgracing opponents, you’re not fighting hard enough. Character assassination has become a business model. But I reject that. Fighting hard doesn’t require fighting dirty. If your ideas require humiliating your adversary, you need better ideas. 

Cruelty travels faster than civility online, and thoughtful disagreement rarely goes viral. If you want attention, the easiest way to get it is to shame someone in public. But I refuse to trade my soul for clicks. And in political debates, the hostility can get ugly. I’ll spare you the vile threats in my DMs.

But the question I try to ask myself before posting isn’t whether something will win the internet for a day. It’s something simpler. Would I be proud of this if my kids read it someday? Will my content help my daughters manage a breakup? Will it help my sons stick up for the kid getting bullied at school? Will it motivate them to grow their own families and build meaningful lives that honor God and America? Kids learn how to behave by watching their parents. More is caught than taught. 

When I started my platform, I imagined a father deployed to a war zone writing letters home, the uncertainty of his return inescapable in his mind. What would he choose to leave behind? He wouldn’t spend his time penning cheap insults about people. He wouldn’t waste words chasing anger. He would try to leave something that lasts — something his children could return to years later and still recognize as true.

He would write about character: courage, faith, responsibility, and the kind of life that puts one on the path to Heaven. So that’s my model. In a strange way, every post feels like a small entry in that kind of journal. I don’t expect my children to read every word. But they could. And they might. Before I hit “send,” I try to run a few questions through my mind:

Is this truthful, fair, decent, civil, and researched?

Does it challenge ideas rather than dehumanize individuals?

Does it reflect the values I promote?

Could I defend this if my kids asked me about it at the dinner table?

The internet encourages a different set of instincts. Volume, not virtue, is rewarded. Cruelty gets mistaken for strength, anger gets mistaken for courage, and sarcasm gets mistaken for intelligence. These are illusions.

Insulting digital strangers isn’t courageous; it’s cowardly. And I’m not raising cowards. It requires no discipline to mock someone online. It takes far more discipline to argue honestly with someone you strongly disagree with. Every parent knows the discipline of restraint. Sometimes the strongest response is the one you choose not to give.

The internet also creates another distortion. It convinces people that their audience is the internet itself: followers, impressions, trending topics. This is the scoreboard. But the real audience for most of us isn’t the crowd inside a screen. It’s the one under our roof. Our kids. Our families. The people who know us in real life.

The internet has a way of flipping those priorities upside down. People build massive public reputations while quietly damaging their private ones. They seek validation from strangers while neglecting the respect of the people closest to them. The algorithm rewards visibility, not character. But influence that costs you your character isn’t influence worth having. 

Someday, when my kids are old enough to read everything I’ve written, they’ll see the arguments I picked, the people I challenged, and the language I used to do it. I hope when that day comes, they don’t just see what their dad believed; I hope they see how he behaved.

I hope they learn that you can fight hard for what you believe without becoming someone you’re not proud of, and challenge people without hating them. You can lift up your values without tearing others down, and you can disagree with people while still recognizing their humanity. Those lessons matter far more than political points.

For now, though, I’ll focus on the influence that matters. There are only four followers I care about pressing “like” when I get home at the end of the day. And I’d rather be front-door famous than viral.

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Gates Garcia is the host of the YouTube show and Podcast, We The People with Gates Garcia. Follow him on X and Instagram @GatesGarciaFL.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.