The Apprentice This year’s Oscar-nominated movies are a snapshot of a short, peculiar moment in American history: the Kamala Harris era. The Harris era exhibited contradictory properties usually associated more with quantum physics than with Hollywood movies: it was both brief and nonexistent. It was an era designed for awards-bait cinema, movies with good intentions, serious, un-self-aware, lacking in Harris’s own campaign promise of “joy.” Made to counter superhero movies and other franchised content, the films of the Harris era often relied on third-act jump scares as dramatic devices. Defined by wishful thinking, these movies presented the triumph of the sacrosanct in difficult, intractable situations that in reality did not offer clear resolutions or even cause for hope. Or, like The Apprentice , these movies succeeded only in making the monsters they scrutinized stronger.…