Hollywood Ostracism 2024: Cast Your Vote Now!

By Chris Revelle | Celebrity | March 26, 2024 |

By Chris Revelle | Celebrity | March 26, 2024 |

“Ostracism” isn’t just a 10-dollar word that sounds vaguely like a scary medical condition or just the term we use to describe social exclusion, it’s also a fascinating concept in the wild history of societies around the globe. In ancient Athens, ostracism was a democratic process by which any citizen of the city-state could be exiled for 10 years. Anyone who attempted to return before this exile was complete would be killed, but if they returned after those 10 years, they would be accepted back without stigma. The goal of ostracism was to preempt the rise of demagogues and despots who could unbalance the power structure of Athens and upend the democratic process.

The goal of ostracism was to punish, but it was also to protect the city from malign anti-democratic influences like fascism. As these things tend to be, ostracism was a flawed system that more cynical operators could manipulate. Still, the idea behind the process is nonetheless intriguing: a community coming together to expel a tyrant in their midst feels positively heady. The ostrakon was the vote each citizen could cast and it was typically a fragment or shard of pottery. Papyrus was too costly to use and broken pottery was everywhere, so these ceramic bits were the ballots everyone cast. Because many Athenians were illiterate, they relied on scribes to write their intended vote on their ostraka.

The natural next thing to wonder might be: what if we brought back ostracism? What if we brought this kind of cut-to-the-bone-the-tribe-has-spoken democratic process to Hollywood? There are so many choices for Hollywood figures ripe for expulsion: corporate ghouls and CEOs, bad and overrated actors, uninspired directors and showrunners, people who simply must go away for reasons from petty to heavy. You can vote for one Hollywood figure to be exiled from the entertainment world for 10 years; who do you choose?

I spent a good long while thinking about whom I would scrawl on my ostrakon and it was pretty difficult to choose just one person. When you’re someone with strongly held opinions, having to choose just one feels impossible. After careful consideration, my vote for Hollywood Ostracism 2024 would be Taylor Sheridan. It would have been enough for this mediocre creator to churn out thinly written cowboy tone poems, but the expansion beyond Yellowstone into drek like Lioness has illuminated his shortcomings further. Sheridan consolidated a stranglehold over Paramount+, appeared to have a white savior view of himself, and stood against writers rooms, all of which paint a picture of an unimaginative egotist who refuses to see why maybe a rich white man is not a good choice for the lone author of stories about people of color. All that aside, I feel his work is lazy, one-note, and wistful about a set of “American values” that hit me as MAGA no matter how it’s sliced. Maybe I would feel differently if his stories brought some new angle or idea to the table, but as-is, his artistic perspective is dreadfully shallow, and I’m simply not interested in what he has to say. For all these reasons, I’m etching “Taylor Sheridan” on my ostrakon.

Now, the power is yours. You’ve got your clay shard in your hand and an opinion in your heart. Who do you vote for in Hollywood Ostracism 2024?