Posted on 02/03/2005 1:30:15 AM PST by goldstategop
If you want to know what’s wrong with the West Coast drivel factory where our popular culture is manufactured, look no further than the 77th Annual Academy Award nominations. The Oscars are Hollywood’s way of celebrating its values – the agenda of a gang of celebrity cretins who need a teleprompter to think.
The Academy Awards ceremony on February 27th will be another orgy of political correctness – this time paying homage to a culture of death.
Garnering 12 nominations among them were “Million Dollar Baby,” “Vera Drake” and “Kinsey” – movies (respectively) promoting euthanasia, abortion and perversion.
Two were box-office bombs. “Kinsey” earned an anemic $9 million and “Vera” $2.3 million – one-tenth the box office of “Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid.” “Baby” has yet to prove itself.
At the same time, “The Passion” (winner of the People’s Choice Awards) will go down as one of the most popular movies of all time, grossing $370 million in domestic box office receipts, and $611 million worldwide. It received a backhanded compliment from the Academy -- three nominations, all of them technical.
“Spiderman 2,” the summer blockbuster ($373.5 million) that praised virtue, also got three minor nominations. “The Village” got one nomination (also minor).
Typical of the movie-land mindset is critics’ treatment of “Vera Drake” (whose title character is a sweet and saintly abortionist) and “The Passion of Christ” – which Hollywood believes was an inflammatory appeal to conservative Catholics and barefoot Baptists.
Contrast the radically different treatment of the films in The New York Times, whose reviewers share a wavelength with the Academy.
The headline in the Times review of “Vera Drake” (“When a Motherly Abortionist Gets Entangled With the Law”) was a dead giveaway.
The film is “suffused with humanity” the reviewer gushed. “Vera wants nothing so much as to support the frightened, the dismayed and the impoverished who seek her help, who come to this tender dumpling of a woman (for an abortion) because they believe they have no other choice.”
Let’s skip the Oscars go directly to canonization.
On the other hand, Mel Gibson’s opus was “so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus’ final hours that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the spirit than in uplifting it,” the Times reviewer inveighed.
Moreover, readers were cautioned, “The Passion of Christ” was designed to “terrify or inflame” the audience. The film was “a sadomasochistic paradox” and director Gibson “a connoisseur of violence.” A movie which millions found profoundly moving is “grim and ugly,” the Times testified.
To charges of anti-Semitism, the reviewer confessed, “To my eyes it did not seem to traffic explicitly or egregiously in the toxic iconography of historical Jew hatred, but more sensitive viewers may disagree.” Finally, the Timesman condescendingly observed that if there is anti-Semitism in the film it “does not seem to exceed what can be found in the source material” (otherwise known as the New Testament).
That the entertainment community agrees with these verdicts may be seen in this year’s Oscar nominations.
Hollywood knows how to reward what “1984” called “good thoughts.” Ask Clint Eastwood with his latest essay in groveling before establishment icons, “Million Dollar Baby.”
The feminist storyline (sweaty women pulverizing each other with body blows) aside, the screenplay could have been smuggled out of Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s prison cell. Naturally, the movie was nominated for six Oscars and named best picture of the year by the National Society of Film Critics.
Hillary Swank, who won an Academy Award for her drag of a performance in “Boys Don’t Cry” (here nominated for Best Actress) plays Maggie -- a stay-hungry, aspiring pugilist. Eastwood is Frankie -- the cynical, world-weary trainer who at first resists Maggie’s entreaties to guide her on the “Rocky” road to success.
He succumbs. They bond. She develops as a fighter, until an accident in the ring leaves her paralyzed. Without the roar of the crowd, Maggie feels she has nothing to live for. She longs for the cold embrace of the grave, and Frankie obliges.
Advocates for the handicapped find the flick less than inspiring. Marcie Roth, executive director of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association charges, “The movie is saying ‘death is better than disability.’”
“I’m just telling a story,” Eastwood testily replies. ‘I don’t advocate. I’m playing a part.”
And if he’d made a movie in which a quadriplegic, ex-boxer decided that life was too precious to throw away, had a religious experience, and decided to devote herself to providing alternatives to abortion, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would have treated it like “Harold and Kumar Go White Castle.”
Eastwood has been in the industry long enough to know exactly how to butter Hollywood’s agenda bread.
With honorable exceptions, Oscar rewards negativity, nihilism, revisionism and a view of life from the bottom of a cesspool.
“Spiderman 2” was the number 2 top-grossing movie of 2004, as well as a rarity -- a sequel that exceeded the original. It was fresh, exciting, and dealt with serious subjects in a serious way. It was nominated for Sound Editing, Sound Mixing and Visual Effects – rather like being nominated for a seat on the Burbank city council.
M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, “The Village,” was reactionary in the best sense of the word – rejecting modernity, while positing the virtues of a bygone era. It was nominated for Music (Score).
“Phantom of the Opera,” a visually stunning, haunting story of love, courage, rage and redemption, was also consigned to the minor league of Oscar nominations.
While “Kinsey,” an art house film whose hero is a pervert (the masochist who launched the sexual revolution – providing Hollywood with an endless source of sick material) got a Best Supporting Actress nod.
The Academy Awards are more than Hollywood thumbing its nose at those whose patronage pays for the extravagant lifestyles of actors and directors. Winners achieve recognition they rarely deserve.
Then the sheep flock to the Oscar-winning film – and in turn are indoctrinated in the industry’s worldview. Thus, those adorable statuettes might be seen as an army of little soldiers marching into battle for Hollywood’s favorite causes.
The spectacle that will take place three weeks hence at Hollywood’s Kodak Theater has nothing to do with art and everything to do with ideology. It will be another crass display of elitist politics – slightly less edifying than the trial of Michael Jackson.
Denny Crane: "There are two places of truth. First God and then Fox News."
It will be interesting to see what kind of tribute they do to Ronald Reagan at the Oscars....
As was Fahrenehit 9/11, so that doesn't prove all that much.
I think we need to create a more conservative Hollywood. Maybe based in Texas.
In my opinion, Hollywood would have rewarded it with a nomination for best picture, and probbly the Oscar as well, if Kerry had won. Unfortunately for Michael Moore and the America-haters in Hollywood (and fortunately for the rest of us) Kerry lost, and F 9/11 is credited for helping Bush as much or even more than hurting him, ergo, Hollywood would just as soon forget the whole matter.
Liberalism =Mental Illness
Are you kidding me? I was a huge fan of the first one, but Spiderman 2 sucked raw eggs. We rented it, and after several painful looks at each other, my wife and I decided to give up and MST3K the movie (mock for comedy value, because thats all the value left). And it got 3 noms? LOL. What a farce.
Blogger Steve Merryman explains this grotesque phenomenom:
In reading this putrid stinking excuse for a columnby James Carroll in the Boston Globe it occured to me that Bush-Hatred is like porn for Liberals.
Like porn of the flesh, it’s the thrill of political extremes that titlllates the Left. In this political peep show, our president is not merely misguided; he’s “deranged". He’s not simply striving for an unattainable goal; he’s a “boy in a bubble” acting with “callow hubris".
Just as porn appeals to the desire to flout societal convention, those on the left must feel great excitement in spewing their sweaty conspiracies, the wackier the better. Nothing is too sinister for this president to attempt. There is no taboo of political discourse the Left is not willing to trample in their need to satisfy their desire. This is the tawdry atmosphere in which it is acceptable, even encouraged, to write such things as “Full blown civil war, if it comes to that, will serve Bush’s purpose, too. All the better if Syria and Iran leap into the fray…” and “The only meaning ‘freedom’ can have in Iraq right now is freedom from the US occupation…”
It must be very titillating to those addicted to such perversions. What else are we to make of such lunatic ramblings as when Carroll likens Bush to the recent train derailment in California in which a suicidal maniac left his car on the train tracks, leaping to safety only to see the train derail and kill innocent travelers?
What is the point of such trash, if not to titillate?
The real damage of porn, we are told, is the objectification of the woman: she is no longer viewed as a person, but merely the means to an end, an object for enjoyment. In the porn of the left, George W. Bush is objectified into something inhuman, incapable of even the most commonplace of human traits. He is the vessel into which the left can thrust their hatred again and again, making wild claims and flinging lunacy upon lunacy in an orgy of twisted logic and foul, squirming lies.
Addiction to porn can render one incapable of engaging in real relationships. One wonders if the left can put such sordid obsessions aside and enter into a real conversation with the American people ever again. Or will they descend ever deeper into the spiral of hate, becoming more deluded with each passing hate-filled ejaculation, until they fade into a syphilitic coma, rendering their party impotent and ultimately, irrelevent.
What interests me most is how much leeway will be allowed for mindless, limo-lib, self-indulgent, leftist rants at this year's ceremonies. Two years before that was a meeting of the Supreme Soviet as enacted by emotionally labile 6 year olds. Last year's awards were suddenly and strangely low key, as if the word had gone out that a sea change was on the way (which it was) and that political rantings would result in the balance of your career doing infomercials in Bulgaria. It will be interesting to see what's on this year's platter.
The "film community" in Austin is dominated by a few Hollywood B-listers and Soros wannabes.
bump
I did enjoy Spidey II immensely. It was the best "superhero" movie to date--
I don't think it's that complicated. F911 wasn't nominated for Best Picture for the same reason a Best Animated Feature category was developed: people in the film community didn't like losing one Best Pic spot to "outsiders" like animators, when they could use that spot to nominate and award potential or past employers. Also, the feeling I get out there is that people think F911 is yesterday's news and has gotten plenty of awards and notice.
Sorry... I left off the </sarcasm> tag... I know they won't do any kind of tribute to President Reagan.
But there is always a section of the Oscars where they remember those who've passed away in the last year. I'll be interested to see if anyone even applauds when his picture is put up. Knowing Hollywood, there will be very few for him (if they don't "forget" to put his picture in...), but at least WE know how great he was.
The important thing to notice about this article is that it doesn't seem the author has even bothered to see the movies he's criticizing in the first place. It seems like he's a.) commenting on a movie orc three that he hasn't seen for himself yet and b.) failing to deal with or acknowledge the technical and artistic achievements of the movies at hand (or the possiblity that they might be considered good movies to people on both sides of the aisle) because he doesn't agree with their perceived political views.
Million Dollar Baby (for one) is a very good film which leaps beyond the limits of the traditional cliched sports movie to deal with complex subject manner in a thoughtful, believable, and very moving way. I wouldn't have nominated it for Best Picture, but Clint Eastwood, Hillary Swank and Morgan Freeman (who is perhaps Hollywood's finest living actor) give excellent, restrained performances clearly deserving of Oscar nominations.
I haven't seen Vera Drake or Kinsey yet, so I really can't tell you what I think of them. I'm not rushing out to see them myself (though Kinsey is on my list of future DVD rentals), but I don't think their Oscar nominations can be denounced as pure partisan politics on Hollywood's behalf without a discussion of the perceived artistic qualities and critical reception of all three films.
A spoiler alert would have been nice.
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