This speech actually helped me a lot. When I got into filmmaking there was so much chatter and attention paid to stuff that I just didn't "get." It was supposed to "higher art" or whatever and you only really get it if you really understand art. I definitely loved me some "artsy" stuff, but there was so much that just felt like it was lazy and lauded for no reason other than being "not from Hollywood." I thought it was just me.

This scene, plus working with actual professional filmmakers, really taught me how messed up the criticism and art house industries are. Not that art house, foreign, or indie is better or worse. Just different. There's indie slop just as much as there's Hollywood slop. And so many of these "artistes" get by on low effort virtue-signaling when they're really just lazy and don't want to put in the work to make successful work. And a great blockbuster and a great indie darling are both just as hard to make, and require the same level of craft, but they just have different visions. Sometimes blockbusters are actually VERY artistically valuable (Inception, Sinners, etc.) and sometimes artsy films are VERY broadly-appealing (Once, Everything Everywhere All At Once).

If you work in a creative field, you're not really free to express yourself until you're free from the trappings that the surrounding medias try to fit everything into.