Know when I realized I'd never fit in in Hollywood? When I realized I universally hate movies about the greatness of Hollywood. My Facebook feed, which is full of white Hollywood people, has been a bukkake bananza for this fucking film. "What's that? A bunch of white people singing and dancing about how great it was under the HUAC? Fuck yeah! Haven't been this psyched since The Artist won best picture!" Even when Hollywood is scolding itself it's fucking tedious. The Player - in which an annoying screenwriter is accidentally killed by an up-and-coming executive who then succeeds forever by covering it up. Crash - in which black people have it rough, but white cops have to live with the guilt of burning bodies and Sandra Bullock stretches by playing someone who gasp doesn't trust minorities. Get Shorty - in which a two-bit thug points out the ridiculousness of Dustin Hoffman while getting to bang Rene Russo. The problem is, your entertainment is largely made by an insular cadre of rich white people who all know each other, all work exclusively with each other, all eat at the same restaurants and even across a metropolis of 20m people all bump into each other regularly because there's an archipelago of tony whiteness floating on a sea of grit. And they will jump at any chance they can find to reinforce the notion that theirs is the One True Religion. I used to think I hated musicals. I don't. I hate the musicals people in Hollywood like. It's funny - you ask someone in Hollywood what the best musical ever made was, they'll tell you Moulin Rouge. You ask someone anywhere else, they'll probably say Fiddler on the Roof. And that's why we get La La Land instead of Cabaret.
You're last point about musical movies really hit home for me. I never thought about how often (famous) musicals are about rich white people doing rich white people things. I've never had a problem with the concept of musical numbers in film, but I've certainly noticed that the majority of musicals only use that expressive power to further a preconceived idea of what the "golden era" of Hollywood was. I could never put a finger on why that bothered me until now, so thank you. (Also I'd just like to point out that the desparity, both in form and content, between klein's and flag's comments made me chuckle a little bit)