Did movie star Clint Eastwood return all six of his Oscars and denounce Hollywood as "morally bankrupt?" No, that's not true: The account that made the claim is part of a network of self-described "parody, satire and tomfoolery" websites that completely make up stories. Eastwood has only won five Academy Awards and there are no reputable news outlets reporting that he has returned any of them.
The claim appeared in a post on the Facebook account of America's Last Line of Defense on May 15, 2024. The text read:
Clint Eastwood Returns All Six Of His Oscars:
'Hollywood is Morally Bankrupt'
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Fri Jun 7 21:12:38 2024 UTC)
The post's caption continued:
According to Eastwood, returning the awards was the only option for him.
'I don't want to be associated with any of the woke nonsense in Hollywood.'
But the pinned comment by the author of the post notes that it is "spin":
America's Last Line Of Defense
This is part of our new 'SpaceX Guy's AI headlines respun into conversational English' series. It's where we take a headline that already included the basics of anywhere between one and nine ALLOD stories with 'woke' added somewhere and spin it again.
Yes, patriots, there is actually a person here doing this on purpose, contrary to the half-dozen meatwhistles calling us a Russian troll farm all day.
They do politics, comrade, we do culture war nonsense. Pay attention. And God Bless America.
Had Eastwood made such an announcement about Hollywood, it would have been national and international news. However, a Google search of related keywords did not return any credible news reports about the 94-year-old actor returning his Oscars and denouncing Hollywood.
Eastwood's biography on the National Endowment for the Arts website (archived here), notes that the actor and director has won five Academy Awards, not six as the post claims.
ALLOD
The post is part of the America's Last Line of Defense (ALLOD) network of satire websites run by self-professed liberal troll Christopher Blair from Maine along with a loose confederation of friends and allies. He runs several websites and Facebook pages with visible satire disclaimers everywhere. They mostly publish made-up stories with headlines specifically created to trigger Republicans, conservatives and evangelical Christians into angrily sharing or commenting on the story on Facebook without actually reading the full article, exposing them to mockery and ridicule by fans of the sites and pages.
Every site in the network has an About page that reads (in part):
About Satire
Before you complain and decide satire is synonymous with 'comedy':sat·ire
ˈsaˌtī(ə)r
noun
The use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.Everything on this website is fiction. It is not a lie and it is not fake news because it is not real. If you believe that it is real, you should have your head examined. Any similarities between this site's pure fantasy and actual people, places, and events are purely coincidental and all images should be considered altered and satirical. See above if you're still having an issue with that satire thing.
Articles from Blair's sites frequently get copied by "real" fake news sites that omit the satire disclaimer and other hints the stories are fake.
At the time this fact check was written, Reuters and Snopes had reviewed the same claim about Eastwood.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims about Clint Eastwood can be found here.
