Why the Oscars are a Con

[smiths]

Why the Oscars are a Con

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is in this tradition. A favourite for multiple Oscars, her film is “better than any documentary I’ve seen on the Iraq war. It’s so real it’s scary” (Paul Chambers CNN). Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian reckons it has “unpretentious clarity” and is “about the long and painful endgame in Iraq” that “says more about the agony and wrong and tragedy of war than all those earnest well-meaning movies”.

What nonsense. Her film offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath high on violence in somebody else’s country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion. The hype around Bigelow is that she may be the first female director to win an Oscar. How insulting that a woman is celebrated for a typically violent all-male war movie.

The accolades echo those for The Deer Hunter (1978) which critics acclaimed as “the film that could purge a nation’s guilt!” The Deer Hunter lauded those who had caused the deaths of more than three million Vietnamese while reducing those who resisted to barbaric commie stick figures. In 2001, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down provided a similar, if less subtle catharsis for another American “noble failure” in Somalia while airbrushing the heroes’ massacre of up to 10,000 Somalis.

By contrast, the fate of an admirable American war film, Redacted, is instructive. Made in 2007 by Brian De Palma, the film is based on the true story of the gang rape of an Iraqi teenager and the murder of her family by American soldiers. There is no heroism, no purgative. The murderers are murderers, and the complicity of Hollywood and the media in the epic crime in Iraq is described ingeniously by De Palma. The film ends with a series of photographs of Iraqi civilians who were killed. When it was order that their faces be ordered blacked out “for legal reasons”, De Palma said, “I think that’s terrible because now we have not even given the dignity of faces to this suffering people. The great irony about Redacted is that it was redacted.” After a limited release in the US, this fine film all but vanished.

continued here
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17541

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

The op article is by JOHN PILGER!...yikes, smiths, don't leave out credit to this anti-fascist truth-teller!...

Pilger cites the symptoms of CIA-Hollywood but without making the exact diagnosis. But he's really close.

Hollywood has been mil-intel psyops since WWII.
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/v ... hp?t=12707
The CIA in Hollywood: 1953 studio mole notes to boss at HQ

This CIA mole at Paramount Pictures claimed he could control almost every aspect of a film....INCLUDING AWARDS.

Good on Pilger for noticing!

George CIA Lucas just wrote merely the preface to a decoy book deceptively called 'George Lucas's Blockbusting: A Decade-by-Decade Survey of Timeless Movies Including Untold Secrets of Their Financial and Cultural Success'
...to pre-empt exposure of his role in CIA-Hollywood by some people at media watchdog orgs and online discussion boards. ahem.

Once you learn how to decode Hollywood scripts, you have the CIA's agenda.

[JackRiddler]

Hell yeah. So much obsequious praise has been thrown at that movie, where the tragedy of war is once again exclusively that of the American soldiers who mysteriously found themselves on the wrong side of the planet being shot at by angry Arabs for no apparent reason.

Although I doubt anything beats Black Hawk Down for depicting the Third World enemy as subhuman crawlies worse than orcs, but even in our supposedly enlightened age, filmmakers are allowed such liberties with Africans (all the more so if they're Muslims).

MOVIE SPOILERS COMING UP!

Here again Kubrick is instructive. Full Metal Jacket looks like his most thrown-together film, very atypical for the master control freak, and yet with this quick and ugly half-effort he bested and skilfully exposed the hypocritical apologetics of all of the other entries in Hollywood's mid-1980s Vietnam wave. If I'd ever met him, I'd have asked if FMJ was specifically targeted at the supposedly antiwar Platoon, which had won the Oscar for Best Picture the year before. Platoon opens with the bright sensitive Charlie Sheen arriving in Vietnam as a volunteer, as though this is where his experience of war starts, with him as a naive believer that the cause must be good. His coming disillusionment is supposed to lend the tragic force. FMJ takes the story of war from its true beginning, spending the first hour showing the brutality and dehumanization of basic training, i.e., of the military itself. Platoon centers on the battle for Sheen's soul between two officers, the compassionate stoner nature-lover Willem Dafoe and the murderous alcoholic Tom Berenger, a heavy-handed metaphor for 1960s America's moral struggle in the "quagmire of Vietnam." FMJ's Joker (Matthew Modine) apes that by wearing a peace symbol on his "Born to Kill" helmet to exemplify, as he mockingly tells an officer, the duality between dark and light that is in us all. It's doubtful he even believes he has a soul. No one in FMJ is naive about what they are doing, and how was it otherwise? Platoon leaves little space for the Vietnamese as the truly aggrieved party, a nation suffering millions of deaths at the hands of a superpower that sees fit to bomb and defoliate the territories both of enemy and "ally" from the air. There's no space at all for the Vietnamese as subjects of their own struggle against an imperialist invasion. In what is taken as the most moving scene, the good sergeant buckles to his knees at center frame and dies in slow motion set to a requiem. A dozen Vietnamese extras fall dead from a helicopter's machine gun fire in the background. FMJ has a sniper kill a half-dozen marines from a nest in the ruined city of Hue, and when finally she is revealed as a girl you realize she was the film's hero. The closing scene has the remainder of the victorious US platoon mopping up, marching with rifles still at the ready and singing the Disney Mouseketeers song. At the call of "Mickey Mouse," the response is not a defiant "Donald Duck" as in the orignal lyrics, but a repeated "Mickey Mouse!" Kubrick leaves no doubt about which side of the "American soul" he thinks came out on top.

[82_28]

Well said Jack!

[Joe Hillshoist]

Yeah Full Metal Jacket shat all over every other Vietnam movie ever.

[Cordelia]

I'm watching 'The Hurt Locker' now and haven't gotten far, but I'm not sure I'll bother finishing it (even though Ralph Fiennes is in it, though he hasn't yet appeared). What propaganda.

Why the Oscars are a Con

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is in this tradition. A favourite for multiple Oscars, her film is “better than any documentary I’ve seen on the Iraq war. It’s so real it’s scary” (Paul Chambers CNN). Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian reckons it has “unpretentious clarity” and is “about the long and painful endgame in Iraq” that “says more about the agony and wrong and tragedy of war than all those earnest well-meaning movies”.

Maybe they're referring to 'earnest well-meaning movies' like 'Battle For Haditha', Nick Broomfield's 2007 brilliant (imho) heartbreaking documentary--style film about the human costs of the Iraq war. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPhhMh1p-Hc

I don't think it was nominated for any awards, and yet 'The Hurt Locker' has been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. (Were there really that few good films made in 2009?)

[JackRiddler]

Probably the greatest "war film" I've ever seen is The Battle of Algiers.

[Uncle $cam]

Probably the greatest "war film" I've ever seen is The Battle of Algiers.

Agreed.

[Cordelia]

Probably the greatest "war film" I've ever seen is The Battle of Algiers.

Thanks for the reminder to see it; my brother recommended it years ago. Maybe one of the first to filmed in 'documentary' style?

My favorite anti-war film is still 'Paths of Glory'--I first saw it at a very impressionable age and re-viewing never lost its original impact.

[Joe Hillshoist]

same here Cordelia.

Its a brilliant movie. In fact i first got exposed to it via one of those British war comics from the 60s. (Commando and the like.)

There is one story that revolves around the lifes of some young men from both sides. Crack shots (and upper class twats) they end up hunting each other through Stalingrad or something.

For a comic that lorifies war it was surprisingly anti war (and sophisticatedly pro Britian and the british war at the same time...) and showed its stupidity, and it had the last 2 lines of this poem running as a theme throughout the story:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th'inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

I read it when I was too young to understand it almost, so it certainly influenced me. And when I saw there was a movie of the same name I sat through it despite the fact that it seemed to be in B&W and more about dialogue than war.

Of course I was only about 10 at the time (if that), so it influenced me immensely. Might have made me cry at the injustice of it all.

(BTW those war comics are filthy propaganda. Don't let your kids read them. Seriously. they fuck with your head.)

[Nordic]

Why is this surprising? The whole "war on terror" thing is heavily backed by the Zionists, and, well, one can rest assured that while Hollywood is very "liberal" on the one hand, on the other hand, it's not a place where you would want to go public with any criticism of Israel (I'll put it that way).

Hollywood's a weird place politically. There are a lot of closet conservatives here. Plus, "The Academy" is really HIGHLY overrated as far as taste goes. Everybody seems to think "The Oscars" has some sort of status above and beyond the fact that it's a bunch of grey-haired people who work in the film industry, not all of whom are really that bright, or creative. It's just a popularity contest, maybe half a step above the infantile Grammys and the MTV music video awards.

[Cordelia]

About Paths of Glory, I remember watching it on T.V., with my brother, in the early 60's, I think, so I was about 10 also. Who can forget the ending, in the bar, when the remaining soldiers are getting drunk and rowdy and the young German woman (Kubrick's future wife) is persuaded, or coerced, to sing. And how they stop whistling at her and quiet down when she begins singing the ballad, and then join her. I can't imagine a dry eye in the audience. Kubrick at his most humble & moving.

Why is this surprising? The whole "war on terror" thing is heavily backed by the Zionists, and, well, one can rest assured that while Hollywood is very "liberal" on the one hand, on the other hand, it's not a place where you would want to go public with any criticism of Israel (I'll put it that way).

Hollywood's a weird place politically. There are a lot of closet conservatives here. Plus, "The Academy" is really HIGHLY overrated as far as taste goes. Everybody seems to think "The Oscars" has some sort of status above and beyond the fact that it's a bunch of grey-haired people who work in the film industry, not all of whom are really that bright, or creative. It's just a popularity contest, maybe half a step above the infantile Grammys and the MTV music video awards.

I hear you loud and clear about Hollywood and its politics. If I had any doubt before, I sure don't now, after finishing 'The Hurt Locker'. The film is so one-dimensional and obvious, I can't imagine any believable justification for its nomination. Now we know a woman (director) can be as macho as the most macho of men. But, we already knew that. (And, to make a disappointing film even more so, Ralph Fiennes appeared for, maybe. 10 minutes. Being macho, of course. I guess he wanted a chance to prove he wasn't really the sensitive character he played in the more multi-dimensional 'The Constant Gardener', lest he be thought a wimp. Hollywood actors can be such whores.)

You're right, the Oscar nominations are popularity contests and the ceremony itself is an elaborate pageant. (I think some of the best acting is that done by the losers when the winner is announced and they look so happy).

[JackRiddler]

Well we've gotten to what I thought the subject was when I first clicked on this thread.

Oh hell yeah. It's about politics, buzz, trends and market success as the Academy's downright embarrassing list of the greatest movies ever makes obvious - not that there aren't a few really good ones on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Aw ... st_Picture

[Joe Hillshoist]

About Paths of Glory, I remember watching it on T.V., with my brother, in the early 60's, I think, so I was about 10 also. Who can forget the ending, in the bar, when the remaining soldiers are getting drunk and rowdy and the young German woman (Kubrick's future wife) is persuaded, or coerced, to sing. And how they stop whistling at her and quiet down when she begins singing the ballad, and then join her. I can't imagine a dry eye in the audience. Kubrick at his most humble & moving.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faithful_Hussar

And while we are on the subject of 1957 war films ... anyone who won the academy ward in 1957?

[Cordelia]

^^Thanks for the lyrics.

'The Bridge Over The River Kwai', well before my time to 'critique' films. However, Danny Peary, in his book 'Alternate Oscars', awarded the best choice for the 1957 Oscar to, (drum roll........) 'Paths of Glory'. (Of the other Academy listed nominees, Peary included only '12 Angry Men' on his list).

(btw, his book ends with 1991, but it's been a great source to find some very good & little known films, though I don't always agree with his Oscar choices.)