A Metaphor for the Letdown of America

Phew, when I don't write for months, I come up with weighty titles. But I also find that I'm months behind the times, for I wanted to write about the Oscars which were already so long ago that it seems silly. Still, I am silly, so I'll do it.

I made an effort to see all the nominees for Best Picture before the night of the awards which meant a whirlwind of movie-going activity that last weekend. I had been resistant to seeing Brokeback Mountain because the subject and the actors didn't interest me, and then with all the hype, I knew it couldn't possibly be very good. And it wasn't. My mother, who had just quit smoking, told me that it was a movie about smoking, and I agree. Smoking and mumbling. Maybe there was a love affair, but how could you tell with all the mumbling. Some gay sheepherder sex would have been a relief to break up the monotony of smoking and mumbling, but despite the hype, there wasn't much of that either.

In fact, the only one of the nominees that I saw before the weekend of the Oscars was Munich, which I found moving but not a Best Picture. Except for Good Night and Good Luck, none of the others appealed to me as any kind of movie a person would want to go see. Which I guess is why they were nominated. Good or bad, each nominee was a film about some theoretically controversial topic -- like Hollywood was trying to shock people, shake 'em up a little. The problem was that these films were such a vanilla way of doing it. Americans could leave the theatre feeling good about themselves because they had just witnessed something a little risque like gay sheepherder sex or racism or witch hunts. But all of the movies dumbed down the topics so substantially, it was just more of what makes us Americans -- we don't really want to be provoked or shocked, we just want to pretend.

When Crash won Best Picture, I was angry. The themes were so transparent, childish, obvious, that the viewer didn't have to think even a tiny bit. But we were told the movie was thought-provoking, so we could feel aware for having been exposed. I thought, the people who voted for this movie voted for George W. Bush, and were as taken in by him as this pedestrian, patronizing film. I thought, the people who voted for this movie are the same ones who will cut arts and music from school curricula because they want math and language scores to go up as part of "No Child Left Behind". I thought, these people are the parents of one of my students who told a racist joke and said it wasn't an ethnic slur because it was about a Chinese person, not an African-American.