The rancid smell of the 2010 Oscars
The Hurt Locker, the Academy Awards and the rehabilitation of the Iraq war
By David Walsh [print_link]
Original Dateline: 11 March 2010 | Reposted by demand: 8.10.10
PHOTO (Left) The age of innocence: The Oscars’ venue 51 years ago.
This year’s Academy Awards ceremony was a spectacle of banality and cowardice.
The three films the Academy rewarded most highly, The Hurt Locker, Precious and Inglourious Basterds, collectively embody something retrograde and foul in the film industry, and all fly under false flags.
The Hurt Locker, despite claims about its “apolitical” or “non-partisan” character, proves in its own unsavory fashion to be a pro-war and pro-imperialist film. Far from offering a compassionate view of inner-city African-American life in America, Precious wallows in social backwardness, which it blames on the oppressed themselves. Quentin Tarantino’s repulsive [but powerfully entertaining] Inglourious Basterds postures as an “anti-Nazi” film, but offers its own brand of porno-sadism, which has more than a whiff of fascism about it.
Three genuinely appalling works.
Seven years ago, in March 2003, only days after the launching of the illegal invasion of Iraq, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore—accepting an Oscar for Bowling for Columbine—denounced George W. Bush as a “fictitious president,” adding, “We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons… [We] are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you.”
Seven years after Moore’s principled statement, the film industry officially threw in the towel last Sunday night in the most disgraceful manner, giving up even the pretense of opposition to the colonial-style wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. The choice of The Hurt Locker as Best Picture, in fact, is part of an ongoing and concerted rehabilitation of the Iraq war taking place within the liberal political and media establishment.
From the Nation, whose Robert Dreyfuss sees “Hopeful Signs” in the recent fraud of an election in Iraq, to the Democratic Party think tank, the Center for American Progress, which claims that the same elections “represent the latest step by Iraqis to reassert control of their own affairs,” the official left and liberal milieu is signaling its endorsement of the permanent US presence in Iraq, aimed at controlling the country’s vast oil reserves.
The well-heeled “anti-war” liberals in Hollywood, for whom opposition to the Iraq invasion in 2003 had a great deal to do with a cultural, psychological animus toward the Bush administration, have also come around. The election of Barack Obama represented for them, as for an entire social milieu, the fulfillment of their political aspirations.
The director of The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow, in her acceptance speech for the Best Directing award, took the opportunity “to dedicate this to the women and men in the military who risk their lives on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world.” Later, accepting for Best Picture, she reiterated, “Perhaps one more dedication, to men and women all over the world who… wear a uniform… They’re there for us and we’re there for them.”
They are not there “for us.” The US military is a professional, not a conscript army, operating as something akin to a hit squad on a global scale in the interests of the American financial elite. All sorts of ex-lefts and liberals are now rallying around the imperialist war efforts, often through the formula of the need to “support the troops.” This is a miserable and cowardly slogan. In practice, it means the effort to discourage and suppress criticism of the origins, conduct and aims of the brutal conflicts.
The success of the awards campaign for The Hurt Locker speaks to the intellectual bankruptcy of critics and the Hollywood elite alike. The film did not go over well with the public, but, as Jeremy Kay, writing in the Guardian, noted, “the thriller had become a critical darling, hailed as the best Iraq war film to come out of the US, and indeed the best visceral slice of war on screen in many a year.” It is no such thing, but far better films such as Battle for Haditha and In the Valley of Elah, and others, were deliberately marginalized by the American media.
The public relations firm hired to handle The Hurt Locker focused on the prospect of Bigelow as the first female director to win an Oscar. “The idea was intoxicating,” writes Kay, “and I can attest to the speed with which it coursed through Hollywood’s bloodstream. Within a day of the nominations on 2 February, there was barely talk of anything else.”
In other words, the director’s gender trumped everything else. Of course, this is not the whole story. Academy voters also flocked to The Hurt Locker because of its theme.
In the guise of objectivity and “authenticity,” Bigelow’s film presents the Iraq war from the vantage point of a “wild man,” bomb disposal expert Staff Sgt. William James. The presence of US forces as an army of occupation is never questioned, and the work of this fearless (frankly, psychotic) individual is presented as heroically saving thousands of lives.
The short stretches of dialogue placed between the various bomb disposal set pieces are contrived and unconvincing. Bigelow has no sense of what soldiers are like, or how human beings interact. Her films (The Loveless, Near Dark, Blue Steel, Point Break, Strange Days) are not made from life, but from confused and murky schemas, including bits and pieces of post-structuralist and postmodernist philosophy.
In her first film, The Set-Up (1978), for example, two men slug it out in an alley while, according to the New York Times, “semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky deconstruct the images in voice-over.” Bigelow once elaborated on its theme: “The piece ends with Sylvère talking about the fact that in the 1960s you think of the enemy as outside yourself, in other words, a police officer, the government, the system, but that’s not really the case at all, fascism is very insidious, we reproduce it all the time.”
One wants to say, one more time, speak for yourself! Bigelow is obviously fascinated by violence and power… and war, which she considers seductive and “exceedingly dramatic.” Bigelow adheres to the idea “that there’s probably a fundamental necessity for conflict” and finds herself drawn to the notion of “a psychology of addiction, or attraction, to combat.”
Admirers claim Bigelow is lamenting or criticizing such a supposed state of affairs. On the contrary, The Hurt Locker glories in and glamorizes violence, which the filmmaker associates with “heightened emotional responses.” All of this, including its element of half-baked Nietzscheanism, is quite unhealthy and even sinister, but corresponds to definite moods within sections of what passes for a “radical” intelligentsia in the US.
Bigelow’s movie, from a script by former embedded reporter Mark Boal, is not anti-war. It merely pauses now and then to meditate on the heavy price American soldiers pay for slaughtering Iraqi insurgents and citizens. As long as they pull long faces and show signs of fatigue and stress, US forces, as far as Bigelow is apparently concerned, can go right on killing and wreaking havoc.
noted last August, “The film’s greatest fallacy is that its makers apparently believe it possible to accurately portray the psychological and moral state of US troops without addressing the character of the Iraq enterprise as a whole, as though the latter does not affect how soldiers act and think.”
The Hurt Locker succeeded with the Hollywood voters, as one commentator noted approvingly, because it “doesn’t force viewers to make a political judgment about the war,” i.e., it accommodates itself to the ultra-right, the Pentagon and the Obama administration.
The annual Academy Awards ceremony is more than simply an opportunity for Hollywood to celebrate itself. The broadcast (seen this year by some 40 million people in the US) has become one of the rituals of American public life, a further way in which public opinion is shaped and manipulated.
Hence, in line with every other such occasion, the awards show is now an entirely canned and sterile event from beginning to end. No one is allowed—or would apparently think—to get out of line, there are virtually no unscripted moments. While the Oscar ceremony may never have had a golden age, there was a time when the event included the possibility at least of genuine sentiment, even of opposition.
Even the documentary feature award, which Moore won for his film in 2003, was tightly controlled. Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers was one of the nominees this year in that category. Ellsberg, who made public the Pentagon’s secret history of the Vietnam War in 1971 and delivered a blow against the government’s version of events, was present for the Academy Awards ceremony last Sunday. In the present atmosphere dominated by corruption and fear, how embarrassing it would have been to be reminded about someone who once stood up to the authorities! PHOTO: (Left) Promo still for A Serious Man
Instead, The Cove, a film about a Japanese fishing village where thousands of dolphins and porpoises are harvested annually, took the prize. The subject may be a worthy one, but it is considerably less important than stopping the murderous Vietnam War, or its equivalents today, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This year’s academy awards, in short, was a new low point. Honest directors and writers and actors in Hollywood will have to open their mouths and act. The present situation is simply untenable from the point of view of filmmaking, and society as a whole.
DAVID WALSH is a senior analyst with the World Socialist Web Site, specializing in art and cinema commentary.
The 82nd Annual Academy Awards: Hollywood celebrates itself, undeservedly
By Hiram Lee and David Walsh
9 March 2010 [print_link]
The broadcast Sunday night from the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, at three hours and 32 minutes, was a long and dull affair in which relatively little of real life found its way into the proceedings. It is difficult to think of a sustained moment that one could single out for praise. Self-absorption, self-congratulation, insincerity and cynicism prevailed.
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What stood out most glaringly about the ceremony was the extent to which the realities of life faced by millions of people were absent, both in the films honored (with few exceptions) and the program itself. The world and the country are gripped by the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, bringing with it high levels of unemployment and social misery, the Obama administration is prosecuting two neo-colonial wars and threatening more, the US seethes with social frustration and discontent, and yet none of this found the slightest expression in last night’s broadcast.
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What does it say about the present state of the commercial film industry that an event bringing together its leading figures should find itself so thoroughly divorced from reality, including widespread popular moods in the US?
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The opening number, starring Neil Patrick Harris, followed by the comic patter of co-hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, set the tone for the evening. Even the tepid “topical” humor of recent years was eliminated. Not a single reference was made to an event or individual outside Hollywood’s inner circles.
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Is it accidental that political jokes at the Oscars entirely disappeared now that Barack Obama sits in the White House?
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For the super-wealthy liberal milieu, the election of an African-American (or a woman, or…) is the apotheosis of their politics. They have reached the limits of their vision. This was reflected in the awards ceremony—the lack of genuine humor, sarcasm, let alone anger. No matter that the Obama administration is one of the most right-wing in modern American history.
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Of the films nominated for Academy Awards, the more intelligent works—A Serious Man, A Single Man and Up In The Air—went entirely unrecognized while the most confused, banal, and in some cases downright filthy (Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, praised by presenter John Travolta for its “rewriting” of history), fared quite well. On this occasion, it seems, the Academy voters put aside whatever critical faculties and taste were available to them when it came time to cast their ballots.
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In the acting categories, Sandra Bullock won Best Actress for her performance as Leigh Anne Tuohy in The Blind Side. Christoph Waltz won Best Supporting Actor for his performance as a brutal Nazi officer in Inglourious Basterds. It was pleasing to see the talented Jeff Bridges acknowledged for his role as “Bad” Blake in Crazy Heart, but, on the whole, the more sensitive and engaging performers nominated—from Maggie Gyllenhaal and Anna Kendrick to Colin Firth and Carey Mulligan—were passed over.
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PHOTO: (Left) The much promoted Precious. Liberal guilt, again.
Mo’Nique was awarded the Best Supporting Actress trophy for her performance as Mary in the film Precious. The abusive mother of a struggling teenage girl in Harlem in the late 1980s, the Mary character was made into something horrific by the filmmakers.
As the WSWS review noted, “Mary is not a human being. She is a monster. Rather than explaining the social relations that produce such extreme forms of backwardness as hers, Precious obscures the causes and sensationalizes the results.” The film becomes a form of titillating (and alarming) the more privileged and complacent with fantasy views of oppressed working class life. It is troubling that the Academy would point to this grotesque portrait as one of the best performances of the year. Precious also won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
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James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar, which we were repeatedly told was the highest grossing film of all time, and perhaps the most talked about and high profile of the nominees, lost in all of the major categories, but received several technical awards—the only territory in which the film could be said to have broken new ground. In any event, it may be that the attacks from the right-wing on Avatar for its fairly forthright depictions of militarism on a fictional planet (with parallels to Iraq and Afghanistan) may have helped cost the film more awards.
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In what amounted to an abandonment of any critical attitude towards the war in Iraq, the academy bestowed the awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing on The Hurt Locker. Telling the story of a US Army bomb squad serving in Iraq, the film is said to be an “apolitical” or “neutral” movie about the war. In fact, The Hurt Locker manages to glorify, or at least sanitize, the role of US troops in the region. Whether the filmmakers are entirely conscious of it or not, their work is meant to obscure the character of the conflict in the Middle East and make the public forget about Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Haditha and every other horror that has been committed by the American military.
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Those who created The Hurt Locker absurdly contend it is possible to tell a truthful story about the troops while ignoring the character of the war they are fighting, one that screenwriter Mark Boal admitted at the awards ceremony was “unpopular.” The war in Iraq is unpopular because its launching has been exposed as based on shameless lies, its conduct continues to be justified by lies, and much of the public, although the media does all it can to cover this up, suspects that oil and other such matters lie at the heart of the ongoing illegal occupation.
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Rather than point to this important reality, director Kathryn Bigelow, Boal and company have created an abstract portrait of courage and “sacrifice,” which could be done in the case of any military force, including Hitler’s Wehrmacht, a portrait whose net effect is to encourage dangerous illusions in the US armed forces and their mission.
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In accepting the awards for Best Director and Best Picture, Bigelow, said, “I’d just like to dedicate this to the women and men of the military who risk their lives every day in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world. May they come home safe.” She added later, “They are there for us, and we are there for them.” At this point in history, with vast numbers of Iraqis dead, a country destroyed by US brutality and recklessness, such comments are thoroughly reprehensible.
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Much was made over the fact that Bigelow was the first woman to win a best directing award. On hand to present the trophy was singer Barbara Streisand, one of Hollywood’s leading millionaire liberals, who proudly declared, “The time has come.” That such a comment could be made and wild applause ring out, simply because Bigelow is woman, tells us what we need to know about the self-satisfaction and ignorance that hold far too much sway in this wealthy and insulated milieu.
That a female director has entered what was previously an “all-boy’s club” is considered a great victory, perhaps the greatest possible victory; that the woman in question has directed a film which might be taken for a pro-war work is beside the point to such people.
The awards ceremony underwent a number of changes this year, in the hopes of attracting a larger audience, particularly among younger viewers. In addition to expanding the Best Picture category to include 10 nominees (in a year in which it would be difficult to come up with 5 films truly deserving of recognition) so that more “popular” studio films would stand alongside smaller, “independent” works as contenders for the top prize, producers made a number of cuts to traditional Oscar night features now deemed too time-consuming or uninteresting to a youthful audience.
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The Academy did a disservice to its viewers this year, and its younger viewers in particular, in eliminating the honorary Oscars and lifetime achievement awards from its broadcast. These awards, honoring veteran artists and performers in the cinema, were handed out at an earlier ceremony that was not televised.
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and Gordon Willis, the cinematographer behind such films as The Godfather, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and All The President’s Men. Both Bacall and Willis, it should be noted, gave us far more substantial works than those being celebrated on the stage during Sunday night’s broadcast. In a healthier cultural climate, the Academy would have considered it a duty to encourage younger viewers to seek out the best works of an earlier period.
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Even the traditional memorial segment, honoring those in the industry who died this past year, seemed rushed and perfunctory.
For now, Hollywood carries on as it has for some time, in a dismal state. A breath of fresh air is sorely needed. We have no doubt that important changes will occur. The social eruption that the present economic crisis is preparing will produce vast changes in artistic and cultural life. New moods will be introduced and new artists will emerge. Some of those currently at work will be reinvigorated. Many of those now celebrated will become irrelevant. This is all long overdue.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
All the writers are members of the World Socialist Web Site.