I thought "Californian bias" was a great term precisely because it isn't quite the same (or as shallow) as "woke". How could the movie industry not have a Californian bias? So much of it is made in that very peculiar culture, peculiar even by American standards.
And yet if you hated that sort of thing, why (or how?) would you become a movie critic? Can you imagine being a classical music critic and intensely disliking Vienna? (Another damn peculiar, damn influential culture, by the way).
I agree. It is clear and self-evident that movie critics have a California bias. I cite Emilia Perez (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/emilia_perez) with a 71% of critics recommending the movie. This movie won *91 awards* this season. This is, by any objective and subjective metric, an atrocious film. Audiences gave it 17% on Rotten and 5.4 on IMDB. Why did this movie win so many awards and positive reviews from critics? Because it has a trans person as the lead. That's it. The bias is on full display with this movie.
But that is more about "woke" than California. My point was that California is peculiar in far more complicated ways than merely being more trans-positive. Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't seem especially "woke" to me, but he seems very California. Scientology is hardly "woke", but it's very California. Steve Jobs, same. Utterly weird culture, if we hadn't been so extremely exposed to it. We think of so many things as normal, even though they're not normal at all in our actual lives where we are, but they're normal in California. (Well, more normal). That was Vienna too. It goes way beyond a simple culture war dichotomy.
I completely agree. Feels a bit ironic that not only do anti-woke conservatives seem to implicitly believe California = woke, but this unnuanced read is apparently held a plurality of liberals as well.
And yet if you hated that sort of thing, why (or how?) would you become a movie critic? Can you imagine being a classical music critic and intensely disliking Vienna? (Another damn peculiar, damn influential culture, by the way).