I'll have to check my diaries, but I'm pretty sure that last night's 81st Annual Academy Awards program was the first of my adult lifetime that I didn't watch even a single second of. This was partly due to circumstance - the first part of the evening was spent at a birthday party, the second half at a Charles McPherson concert in La Jolla. Then again, Jane and I don't actually get any TV channels anymore - we haven't yet hooked up our soon-to-be-obsolete antenna to our television, and I don't see that happening any time soon. But beyond mere physical obstacles to viewing the Oscars lies the philosophical differences. Simply put, my sense of taste and the Academy's sense of taste do not dovetail.
Rarely do the films I most care about or even halfway enjoy make their way into the sealed envelopes. This year, I hadn't even seen any of the five nominated films, and had little desire to change this situation. If last year's Oscars had at least made nods towards some of the darker and complex works being offered up by Hollywood, this year went right to the feel-good heartstrings of little-watched mainstream films which garnered lukewarm critical approval and so-so box office returns. If Slumdog Millionaire is not the lousiest movie to win Best Picture (and it isn't - 2004's Crash immediately springs to mind, as does 1952's The Greatest Show on Earth), Danny Boyle's vision (such as it is) still isn't worthy of the accolades it's been receiving. One suspects that many of the dewey-eyed Academy members swooning over the "exotic" nature of this Bollywood knock-off have had few experiences with the culture of the Indian sub-continent aside from sending back their chicken tikki masala at the Star of India for being too spicy. Sit 'em down with a copy of Bollywood / Hollywood, or, better yet, an actual Bollywood film, non-dependent upon English game shows as major plot points or directed by British individuals, and see if they're still wowed by Boyle's innovations.
But this should really come as no surprise, as the Academy, despite right-wing cries to the contrary, represents one of the most conservative entities this side of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. While they may vote straight democratic tickets and show proper concern for whales and rain forests, they still prefer to ape the status quo and choose safe narratives reflecting traditional American values while bedecking themselves in outfits and jewelry costing more than most working people take home in a decade. Whatever Bill O'Reilly thinks about the menace of Hollywood liberals, they're a weak and ineffectual breed of leftist, eager to boo Michael Moore's anti-war speech when it deigned to fall upon diamond-earring-clad-lobes mere hours after the bombs had begun to fall. George Clooney noted once from the podium how Hollywood was handing out awards to African-American actors while the rest of American society barred them from water fountains, but he failed to mention that Hattie McDaniel was forced to sit at a table placed far in the back, segregated from her Gone With the Wind colleagues. Tom Hanks, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Sean Penn may all have won awards for portraying gay men, but it seems the Academy does prefer gay roles to be played by straight actors, and for the characters to be killed at some point in the respective film.
Look, I could go on. Don't get me started on the Academy's love affair with Ron Howard. And please let's not broach the topic of Stephen Daldry's utterly loathsome The Reader, this year's Holocaust offering, in which once again the Sho'ah is presented to English speakers as a backdrop to a semi-steamy love affair. But I'm aware that it's more than slightly ludicrous for me to go on at such length about a ceremony I didn't see offering awards to films I haven't watched. So I'll quit. But reviewing the Oscars is kind of like being a food critic for McDonald's - do you really have to sample the entire menu and visit every location to get the point? By browsing the morning-after commentaries and celebrity blogs, it seems that the most electrifying moment of the evening came when Jennifer Aniston made some kind of brief presentation and the cameras made an immediate cut to a poker-faced Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in the front rows. Somehow, I think I'll be able to get through the week having missed that moment in cinema history.
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5 weeks ago
2 comments:
I concur and just wanted to add that I thought Slumdog was the worst film I'd seen in theaters in years. I avoided seeing Crash, so I can't say which was worse.
Slumdog is a reactionary film, both in a cultural sense and in its view of the problem of poverty. A bad film normally wouldn't bother me so much, but it troubles me that so many would hail a film so simplistic and wrongheaded as this one at precisely the time when circumstances demand that we search for new and challenging answers to the social and economic problems we face.
It doesn't even make for good, mindless movie-watching fun, in my opinion, because it's so deficient in imagination. And it moralizes so much despite its superficiality that it's hard to take it as escapism, even though that's really what it is.
Please forgive the rant.
Gregory -
I'm glad to hear your thoughts on the matter, and as you actually did see the film (unlike me), you have the benefit of evidence on your side (is this one of the films you watched when you were back in Omaha? I seem to recall you mentioning it...). Empty-headed escapism always sounds like a good idea until you realize how much damage any kind of escapism can cause, which makes the empty-headed variety even more disturbing.
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