I made no Oscar predictions, placed no bets, nor rooted for any particular movie, actor, techie, designer, or song to win. I couldn't. I didn't see a single one of the movies nominated for Best Picture and precious few of any of the others that produced nominees in other categories.
This is due to two things.
We still haven't found a reliable babysitter down here after a whole year! (Any of you living in Maurice Hinchey's district have teenage daughters who want to pick up some cash? We pay well and the boys are very well-behaved.) Consequently almost the only movies we see in the theaters are movies Matt and Jack want to see too. Which is why I can assure you that Hellboy is a lot better than you might think.
The other reason though is that even if we had a babysitter we would have had to go out to the movies every other night in December in order to see all the nominated movies. It's been a long time since the Oscars rewarded the best films of the year. The Oscars reward the Best Movies Released Between November 1 and Christmas Day. Look at the list of Best Picture nominatees. Was there a single one you could have gone to in the summer, let alone last spring?
I'm sure that if the movie that I have no doubt was truly the best movie of 2004, Spider-man 2, had been released at Thanksgiving it would have swept the awards. Alfred Molina and J.K. Simmons would have had their best actor in a supporting role nominations. Morgan Freeman probably still would have won, for the usual Oscar reasons. Scott Lemieux calls it The Body of Work Award.
And if Sideways had been released in the spring, like Alexander Payne's masterpiece, Election, or even in the summer or early fall, like Garden State this year or The Station Agent last year, we wouldn't be talking about whether or not Virginia Madsen and Paul Giamatti make a plausible couple. A stupid debate anyway, more revelatory of female insecurity and frustrated male vanity than anything. Virginia Madsen wasn't playing a woman who looks like Virginia Madsen. She was playing an actual human being. It's either a failure of her acting ability or a mistake by the cinematographer and make up people that she came out looking like Virginia Madsen. A better actress would have made us forget she looked like a movie star.
Sandra Bullock used to be very good at this.
But that's a discussion that might have been dealt with quickly over coffee after the movie and forgotten. What we'd be talking about is what a rip it was that that movie about the guys who go wine tasting, what was it called, oh yeah, Sideways, what a rip Sideways wasn't nominated and how the Oscars continually overlook great movies about grown-ups made for grown-ups.
(Scott Lemieux's post Backlash will make you wish you'd had coffee with him after seeing the movie.)
The Oscars didn't used to have a long-term memory problem. Somebody in marketing somewhere changed that.
At any rate, it would have been hard for me to get to see all the Oscar nominees, even if I'd wanted to. Sideways we'll see, but we've always been meaning to. The Aviator? I'm not sure. Million Dollar Baby---well, I sort of feel obligated now.
When I said I had no rooting interest in any of the nominees, I meant that the part of me that loves movies didn't care who won because I didn't know who I would have thought deserved to win.
But the part of me that is partisanly political was rooting hard for Clint and his Million Dollar Baby.
I hate this. I hate that it's become nearly impossible to have a non-political reaction to the movies.
They're trying to poison everything, aren't they? The Right.
Everything is a political litmus test for them now. The movies you like, the TV shows you watch. The way you raise your children, how you handle your checkbook, the church you go to, the jokes you laugh at, the car you drive, the sports you follow, who you're glad to see is dead.
I used to teach college and I thought I knew what Politically Correct was.
Apparently, though, the post-modernists, deconstructionists, historicisits, feminists, and queer studies profs of the mid 90s can't hold a candle to the frat brothers of the wingnut faction of the blogosphere when it comes to being PC.
These guys can't make a move, think a thought, buy a book, see a movie, or sing a song that hasn't been thoroughly vetted by the elders of the Church of the Republican Jesus and stamped with the imprimatur of Pope Karl Rove.
They don't even use hot water when they wash their hands because it comes out of the left side of the tap.
And, you know what? Liberals started it. We did. Those of us who were overly-influenced by the Marxists among us. Those of us who still are, still do it.
But they've gone farther and done it better. No surprise when you look at how many former Marxists there are among the neo-cons. Marxists, hell. Stalinists.
It's also turned out that the students who learned the most from all the -ist professors in the 70s, 80s, and 90s were their most conservative students.
All those kids who whined about how they couldn't get a fair shake from their liberal profs grew up to think exactly like them, at least when it came to methodology.
Which makes sense. The best students would have been the ones who loved their subjects. In the literature classes, that meant that the best students were paying much closer attention to the books they were reading than to the rhetorical tricks their professors were using as ways of stimulating discussion of those books.
The smart kids who didn't care about the subject paid attention to the prof.
And just as the professors used the racism in Heart of Darkness or the sexism in Taming of the Shrew to attack Conrad and Shakespeare as writers, the winger PC police use Eastwood's supposed support for euthenasia to attack Million Dollar Baby.
Just like a lot of their professors they have no clue as to how art works and can't differentiate characters from their creators. And just like a lot of their professors they think it is not the job of art to represent life but to argue a political point.
Michael Medved doesn't count. He's just a hack who figured out that there was more money to be made flattering the prejudices of a right wing audience of philistines than in being a poor man's Roger Ebert and writing mediocre movie reviews for people who really like movies.
But Medved is a useful tool and he does make a lot of money as a hack, which means he has a lot of customers.
It's ok if they want to play these games alone. But they're intent on ruining the movies for the rest of us.
The wingers aren't satisfied with being PC themselves. They need liberals and leftists to be PC in everything too. And they're willing to tell us exactly how we are to go about this.
For instance, as Roy Edroso reported the week the Oscar nominations were announced, the Left was supposed to be having conniptions over the fact that Fahrenheit 9/11 didn't get a nod.
Roy reported that Roger Simon and Glenn Reynolds, helpfully, even offered us reasons for being upset. According to them, by not nominating Michael Moore for anything, Hollywood had shown it had collectively decided that the fight for the right to torture and sponsor death squads in the name of saving the President's reputation---whoops, I mean, the fight for democracy in Iraq---is a good and noble cause.
By that logic, the fact that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ got snubbed up and down the board means that while embracing the cause of democracy Hollywood has rejected the divinity of Jesus and the notion that through his suffering and dying on the cross we were all guaranteed our salvation.
Does the Pope know?
Turns out though that Hollywood's neo-conservativism on Iraq isn't enough to save its collective soul. You can't get saved just by skunking Michael Moore, not while embracing the Culture of Death celebrated in Million Dollar Baby and whatever the heck it was that made them condemn Sideways. Can someone tell me what it is they object to? The cultural elitism represented by oenology? Would it have been a more politically acceptable movie if instead of embarking on a wine tasting tour of California the main characters had gone on a bar crawl in Dallas?
Now, back in this universe, where the sky is blue, we're pretty much used to the idea by now that our favorite movies often get overlooked by the Academy at Oscar time.
We've also watched enough Oscar ceremonies to have figured out how the Academy thinks and to know that Michael Moore lost his chance for another Oscar any time soon with his speech when he won for Bowling for Columbine.
This should be known as The Sacheen Littlefeather Factor. (Follow the link, you'll be pleasantly surprised.) It could also be called the George C. Scott Effect. The Academy never forgave Scott for not bothering to show up to accept his Oscar for Patton.
It's possible that the Academy deliberately overlooked Fahrenheit 9/11 to give it cover for rejecting The Passion of the Christ. But it's even more probable that everybody out there said to themselves, Hey, Michael's already got his Oscar, why stir up trouble?
What the Motion Picture Academy is, more than it is liberal or political in any way, is full of itself. And what it cares about more than anything, more than whether or not a movie was any good, or if it made money, or if it has a political messge, is that when the time comes, all the nominees act as if an Oscar is as important as the Nobel Peace Prize.
Pomposity, fake humility, and a groveling gratitude at having been blessed by such a high honor are the correct emotions for all winners. Anyone who stands up there with Oscar in hand and makes a political statement is telling the world that there are more important things in life than movies.
I can't remember every Oscar show I ever watched, but I'm pretty sure that it's only been in last decade or so that every show has either begun or included at a critical moment a long, dully and pompously narrated montage of film clips meant to remind us that AMERICA IS THE MOVIES.
Snore.
The last few ceremonies have reminded me of nothing more than a wake. And not an Irish wake.
This is why even though they're fixed The Golden Globes are a whole lot more interesting and fun to watch.
They're a whole lot more fun to attend.
Halle Berry did a beautiful thing, showing up to accept her Razzie for Catwoman, but I'll bet she had a blast at their party too. (Link thanks to thorswitch at Different Strings.)
Fahrenheit 9/11 was a great piece of journalism, and if it had appeared on television it would have gone down in the annals of great broadcast journalism alongside Harvest of Shame. And if it had and then been shut out by the Emmys, I'd have been ticked.
Bryant at Population:One makes some similar points, a lot more succinctly, and he sums up nicely, saying of Jim Geraghty of the National Review, who was helping to push the Political Correctifying of the movies:
I think it’s really sad that a guy who writes for a fairly important conservative national magazine doesn’t understand the difference between appreciating someone’s ideology and appreciating their artistic talent.
Exactly. It's possible to share an artist's politics and still think his work is lacking and that that lack is not more and more strident politics but more art. Steven Speilberg is a good liberal and The Terminal has a political message that is basically liberal---although it has a moral message that some people would call conservative that trumps its politics. Still neither the political message nor the moral message matter as much as the art. The dialogue is not as sharp as it could have been and the pace could have been picked up and so while I enjoyed the movie, it was mostly for the actors' performances, and I don't think it was unfairly overlooked by the Academy.
Except those weren't the reasons it was overlooked.
You know why The Terminal wasn't nominated?
It was released in June.
I won the Oscar pool at our party of 30 people this year and what made me proudest was that I hadn't actually seen any of the nominated movies other than "Harry Potter." It actually came down to a three-way tie with only Best Director and Best Movie remaining, with my competitors having chosen Scorcese and "The Aviator." When I read some weeks ago that the wingnuts were attacking "Milion Dollar Baby" on "right-to-die" grounds, it struck me that this was the push needed for victory.
As for who should have actually won, I just think of the entire ceremony as another form of electoral politics. Occasionally, the right person will triumph, but it doesn't happen very often.
Posted by: sfmike | Tuesday, March 01, 2005 at 07:10 PM
I think they were attacking 'Million Dollar Baby' (wonderful movie by the way. It tore me up) partly because the expected snubbing of Passion of The Christ at the expense of Farhenhiet 9/11 didn't happen so they had to find something else to stir up a controversy about. You have to keep the troops ANGRY about something all the time.
I wonder how they felt about Clint "conservative" Eastwood saying nice, chummy things to Warren "liberal" Beatty. The horror!
Posted by: LondonLee | Wednesday, March 02, 2005 at 11:18 AM
Nice post. Not sure I'd call F9/11 "a great piece of journalism" under traditional definition. But it was a great piece of persuasive filmmaking, and who's to say what the definition of "journalism" is any more, anyway. You're absolutely right about the Oscars. The Hollywood crowd has raised inflated self-importance to a high art. For me, the show's entertainment value is in it's transformance into pure (and purely unintentional) parody...
Posted by: mark | Wednesday, March 02, 2005 at 11:27 AM
When I grew up in Singapore, the Oscar movies wouldn't have made their way to our cinemas by the time of the ceremony (that's changed now, fortunately). It was kind of fun then, since you had to guess who'd win based on snippets of news and rumours and reviews in magazines, and the Oscars served as a sort of trailer for upcoming movies.
And the Oscars always favour bombast over subtlety. Quiet acting in "personal" films never gets a chance.
Posted by: Daryl | Wednesday, March 02, 2005 at 11:55 AM
The thing that amuses and saddens me is that MDB came under fire from both sides; there's a substantial number of liberals who disliked it because of perceived classism and sexism. I think maybe they've got half a point on classism -- the trailer park family was indeed a parody -- but zero points on sexism. The motivating decision in the conclusion came from one person and one person only.
Great post.
Posted by: Bryant | Wednesday, March 02, 2005 at 12:36 PM
Addendum: Eternal Sunshine. Deserved much more than it got; never had a chance to get it. Release date. Yeah.
Posted by: Bryant | Wednesday, March 02, 2005 at 12:36 PM
Was The Terminal overlooked because it was released in June, or was it released in June because someone didn't think it stood a chance at getting nominated? Here in LA, a pile of movies get released between Christmas and New Years just to qualify for the Oscars. NYC gets them too, but the rest of the country, devoid of Academy voters, doesn't get them until mid January. Try to see a movie here in September that doesn't completely bite. No summer blockbusters, no Oscar contenders, just junk. The studios seem to assume that Academy voters have very short memories. They must be right.
Posted by: Mary | Wednesday, March 02, 2005 at 05:46 PM
A lot of documentarians are offended by Michael Moore, not because he's a lefty, but because he takes dramatic shortcuts that call into question the whole concept of the documentary film. I did a story on a film festival last fall and talked to Robert Hudson (who with his partner won an Oscar this year for their stunning "Mighty Times") and this is what he said about Moore:
“If I was making spit and chewing gum documentaries like Michael Moore, winging it, and patching over questionable parts with obvious seams because it’s part of what makes you money at the box office; well, that’s not what I call a real documentary.”
Film is not all about politics. Wasn't that a central part of your overall point?
Posted by: Kit Stolz | Thursday, March 03, 2005 at 02:11 AM
Kit, yup.
Mary, May and June are when the movies expected to be summer hits are released so I don't think people around Hollywood doubt their quality---they may doubt their "seriousness," though. The Oscars like "serious."
Bryant, Thanks. Yours too. And the "liberal" criticisms of MDB make no sense to me either. But then I haven't seen the movie yet. Nor Eternal Sunshine. More to look forward to.
Daryl, that's how the Oscars were for me growing up too, except that I wasn't waiting for them to be released in the theater, I had to look forward to them coming to HBO when my parents decided I was old enough to see them. But there was the same thrill of anticipation involved. I don't think the Oscars show enough clips from the nominated movies. Or long enough clips.
Mark, see Kit's comment. You'll like.
Lee, dead on.
And, finally, SFMike, Congratulations. Now are you going to buy us all a beer with your winnings?
Posted by: Lance | Thursday, March 03, 2005 at 08:33 AM
Lance, the Moore/Murrow comparison will doubtless raise some eyebrows, but if Murrow had taken on J. Edgar or even JFK the same way Moore took on Bush he'd surely have been villified for it at the time.
That said, Moore's too heavy-handed to be called a journalist by my standards, but he's certainly playing by the same journalistic standards of his most ardent critics, so I forgive him some of his excesses. And I do love his work.
A close secondhand account of his tactics did tarnish him in my mind for a while. One of my best friends was a manager at a Border's store in Chicago and was charged with expelling Moore from the premises a few years ago. Moore orchestrated a union organization effort in the place and then tried to film the upshot of his efforts; it would have been different if he'd shown up to objectively observe a real worker rebellion there, except that none existed.
Posted by: alex | Thursday, March 03, 2005 at 11:53 AM
Eternal Sunshine rocks; MDB is pretty darned good but I think flawed, as all films with Morgan Freeman will be flawed until someone makes him play a different part. I think every director who wants to cast Freeman should be forced to watch Street Smart a couple times until they realize who's playing the pimp. Anyhow.
Moore sometimes reminds me a lot of James Lileks, from the other direction.
Posted by: Bryant | Thursday, March 03, 2005 at 06:16 PM
WHO IS SACHEEN LITTLEFEATHER?? Good question. I'm her sister and that seems to be a life long theory. The Marlon Brando status lingers on, her position as an indian activist, and the coordinator for Saint Katrina. Her official website is open to interviews, personal appearnces, etc. A pillar of the Indian community who is federally disabled,and practicing elder abuse with our mother. Complete isolation and control from a selected group. Our mother's spirit is rapidly fading as a prisoner. Oh yes, did I mention how spiritual she is?? Check out her Website.
Posted by: Rozalind | Sunday, October 01, 2006 at 09:15 PM