{"id":2502,"date":"2010-02-10T23:08:53","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T03:08:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=2502"},"modified":"2010-02-10T23:20:29","modified_gmt":"2010-02-11T03:20:29","slug":"why-the-oscars-are-a-con","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=2502","title":{"rendered":"Why the Oscars are a Con"},"content":{"rendered":"

By John Pilger
\nFebruary 10, 2010 – johnpilger.com<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n

The Oscars<\/a>Why are so many films so bad? This year\u2019s Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America\u2019s divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory. When will directors and writers behave like artists and not pimps for a world view devoted to control and destruction?
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\nI grew up on the movie myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be a native American. The formula is unchanged. Self-regarding distortions present the nobility of the American colonial aggressor as a cover for massacre, from the Philippines to Iraq. I only fully understood the power of the con when I was sent to Vietnam as a war reporter. The Vietnamese were \u201cgooks\u201d and \u201cIndians\u201d whose industrial murder was preordained in John Wayne movies and sent back to Hollywood to glamourise or redeem.<\/p>\n

I use the word murder advisedly, because what Hollywood does brilliantly is suppress the truth about America\u2019s assaults. These are not wars, but the export of a gun-addicted, homicidal \u201cculture\u201d. And when the notion of psychopaths as heroes wears thin, the bloodbath becomes an \u201cAmerican tragedy\u201d with a soundtrack of pure angst.<\/p>\n

Kathryn Bigelow\u2019s The Hurt Locker is in this tradition. A favourite for multiple Oscars, her film is \u201cbetter than any documentary I\u2019ve seen on the Iraq war. It\u2019s so real it\u2019s scary\u201d (Paul Chambers CNN). Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian reckons it has \u201cunpretentious clarity\u201d and is \u201cabout the long and painful endgame in Iraq\u201d that \u201csays more about the agony and wrong and tragedy of war than all those earnest well-meaning movies\u201d.<\/p>\n

What nonsense. Her film offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath high on violence in somebody else\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The accolades echo those for The Deer Hunter (1978) which critics acclaimed as \u201cthe film that could purge a nation\u2019s guilt!\u201d 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\u2019s Black Hawk Down provided a similar, if less subtle catharsis for another American \u201cnoble failure\u201d in Somalia while airbrushing the heroes\u2019 massacre of up to 10,000 Somalis.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cfor legal reasons\u201d, De Palma said, \u201cI think that\u2019s 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.\u201d After a limited release in the US, this fine film all but vanished.<\/p>\n

Non-American (or non-western) humanity is not deemed to have box office appeal, dead or alive. They are the \u201cother\u201d who are allowed, at best, to be saved by \u201cus\u201d. In Avatar, James Cameron\u2019s vast and violent money-printer, 3-D noble savages known as the Na\u2019vi need a good guy American soldier, Sergeant Jake Sully, to save them. This confirms they are \u201cgood\u201d. Natch.<\/p>\n

My Oscar for the worst of the current nominees goes to Invictus, Clint Eastwood\u2019s unctuous insult to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Taken from a hagiography of Nelson Mandela by a British journalist, John Carlin, the film might have been a product of apartheid propaganda. In promoting the racist, thuggish rugby culture as a panacea of the \u201crainbow nation\u201d, Eastwood gives barely a hint that many black South Africans were deeply embarrassed and hurt by Mandela\u2019s embrace of the hated Springbok symbol of their suffering. He airbrushes white violence \u2013 but not black violence, which is ever present as a threat. As for the Boer racists, they have hearts of gold, because \u201cwe didn\u2019t really know\u201d. The subliminal theme is all too familiar: colonialism deserves forgiveness and accommodation, never justice.<\/p>\n

At first I thought Invictus, could not be taken seriously, then I looked around the cinema at young people and others for whom the horrors of apartheid have no reference, and I understood the damage such a slick travesty does to our memory and its moral lessons. Imagine Eastwood making a happy-Sambo equivalent in the American Deep South. He would not dare.<\/p>\n

The film most nominated for an Oscar and promoted by the critics is Up in the Air, which has George Clooney as a man who travels America sacking people and collecting frequent flyer points. Before the triteness dissolves into sentimentality, every stereotype is summoned, especially of women. There is a bitch, a saint and a cheat. However, this is \u201ca movie for our times\u201d, says the director Jason Reitman, who boasts having cast real sacked people. \u201cWe interviewed them about what it was like to lose their job in this economy,\u201d said he, \u201cthen we\u2019d fire them on camera and ask them to respond the way they did when they lost their job. It was an incredible experience to watch these non-actors with 100 per cent realism.\u201d <\/p>\n

Wow, what a winner.<\/p>\n

www.johnpilger.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By John Pilger February 10, 2010 – johnpilger.com Why are so many films so bad? This year\u2019s Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America\u2019s divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory. When will directors and writers … Continue reading Why the Oscars are a Con<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,178],"tags":[279],"class_list":["post-2502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international","category-media","tag-oscars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2502"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2504,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2502\/revisions\/2504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}