Politics & Power Quote by Larry McMurtry

McMurtry isn’t just complaining about Hollywood gatekeeping; he’s diagnosing a cultural wiring problem. By pointing to “Members of the Academy” as “mostly urban people,” he frames taste not as neutral judgment but as demographic gravity. Awards bodies don’t merely reward what’s “best.” They reward what feels legible, urgent, and familiar to the people doing the rewarding. That’s the quiet sting: rural life isn’t rejected because it lacks artistry, but because it fails the insider test of recognition.

The line “We are an urban nation” works like a blunt instrument. It’s rhetorically overconfident, almost daring you to argue. Of course the country still contains vast rural geographies; McMurtry is talking about cultural power, not acreage. The subtext is that America’s self-image has migrated upward and inward, toward cities, institutions, and the kinds of narratives that circulate there. Rural stories become “regional” in the pejorative sense: niche, nostalgic, or politically coded before they’re even read.

Context matters: McMurtry built a career insisting that the West wasn’t a postcard but a lived-in place full of compromise, boredom, cruelty, and humor. His remark carries the weariness of someone who knows how often rural settings get flattened into genre (the cowboy myth) or pathologized (backwardness, resentment). “It’s not easy even to get a rural story made” is less a production note than a warning: when a culture’s storytellers cluster in one kind of life, entire other lives become harder to imagine at all.