Les Jones

A&E > Oscar Bits

The LA Times has a roundup of articles about the movies nominated for best movie: Giving the lie to five Oscar pics. Via LA writer Matt Welch, who wrote the criticism of Crash's depiction of Angelenos as racist hotheads.

Haggis wrote "Crash" after his Porsche was carjacked. A rich Hollywood progressive, he wanted to understand his attackers (in a similar act of condescension, he cast rapper Chris "Ludacris" Bridges as one of the movie's articulate black thugs because Bridges brought "authenticity, the street").

It's hard to observe street-level race relations from an opulent perch (Haggis' house was used as the district attorney's mansion in the film). And hey, I'd have some racial baggage too if I'd written for "Diff'rent Strokes." But "Crash" has about as much to do with the real L.A. as Woody Allen.

Mary Steyn explores the political angle of the five best picture nominees, which may explain a certain fact:

This year’s five Best Picture nominees are all “films that broach the tough issues”, as USA Today puts it: “Brokeback and Capote for their portrayal of gay characters; Crash for its examination of racial tension; Night for its call for more watchdog journalism; and Munich for its take”. Whoops, my mistake. That should be “Munich for its take on terrorism”. In their combined take at the box-office, these Best Picture nominees have the lowest grosses since 1986.

...

Perhaps next time they should make it two gay sheep herders in, say, Medina, or a gay Pushtun goatherd and a gay Uzbek warlord: The Mohammedans Go To The Mountain – that should light up the box-office. Or perhaps they could make Broke Back Toutin’, a film about an American media utterly exhausted by its frantic efforts to flog these movies to a general audience. As it is, Hollywood’s new reputation for “serious” “challenging” “works” seems merely the dinner-theatre production of the usual self-reinforcing Democrat-media bubble. A film-maker makes a film about a courageous pressman and the pressmen hail him as a courageous film-maker for doing so. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall have nothing on the romance between George Clooney and the world’s press.