In a rather agitated rant about today’s reality television culture, award-winning actor/director/screenwriter Billy Bob Thornton bashes shows like The Food Network’s “Cupcake Wars” and, more profoundly, modern society.

His monologue on Oprah’s Master Class opens by lamenting the regressing quality of human nature:

“We’re living in a time that’s just become judgmental and everybody wants to see failure. They want to see people knocked off the hill. You can’t have a television show without a competition because they want to see who cries this week and who goes downhill, who gets kicked out.”

Afterwards come the most defining lines of the clip, when he calls out Cupcake Wars:

“We don’t need one show about cupcakes, as far as I’m concerned, but you know what, if you got one—okay, that’s fine. Let’s have a show about cupcakes. But does it have to be a fucking competition? Do you have to have cupcake wars? And I’m sure people who have been in war kind of take offense to that because seriously, it’s not that goddamn dangerous to make a cupcake.”

We’re hoping for more quality cooking television as well, but in the meantime, we’ll have to settle for reality cooking shows where contestants battle it out and talk shit about each other for the camera.

He continues by musing, “I’m just really ready for people to kind of settle down and know each other again and root for each other as opposed to look for the faults in each other.”

That thought’s a little too sober for us, but right on, Billy Bob.

[via HuffPo]

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