It seemed clear enough to me, but maybe it wasn't, or maybe you just read it too fast and overlooked the 'except of course that the merit on which you're judged...' part.

The point I was trying to make is that Hollywood is highly meritocratic in the sense of lavishly rewarding success and harshly punishing failure at the box office; I figured it was rather obvious that in reality it's nonsensical to ascribe success or failure at the box office of any given movie only to the excellence of one star actor's work. So it's a rather cynical interpretation of the term 'meritocratic', yes, but nevertheless it's a place where your financial and social gains are determined to a huge extent by your results. More so than in most other places I can think of.

The 'optimistic about capitalism' part is because you're apparently convinced that outside Hollywood, capitalism is so meritocratic and does such a good job at rewarding people not just based on shallow results like in Hollywood, but based on their true merits and the real quality of their work. Which I was rather doubting.