The Academy Awards are just around the corner. Normally, I don’t pay much attention to the shenanigans of movie stars and celebrities. My youngest son, Billy, is the family movie guru; he is in film school at UNO, and can tell you the name of every winner since they started passing out Oscars in 1929. But they have started talking politics about this year’s nominees, so my ears have perked up.
I don’t pay much attention to the Academy Awards, because they don’t reveal who the voters are, and I could never figure out what criteria they use when making their selections. Two of the worst movies I ever suffered through — The Accidental Tourist and Lost in Translation — were nominated for best picture, while some of my favorites — American Graffiti, Saving Private Ryan, Dead Poets Society and Apocalypse Now — were nominated, but lost to rather unmemorable movies.
The worst years were 1998, when Shakespeare in Love beat out Saving Private Ryan, and 1999, when American Beauty beat out The Green Mile, The Cider House Rules and The Sixth Sense.
I prefer sports: My teams don’t always win, but at least I understand the process by which they lose.
I recently saw American Sniper, a film that is nominated for best picture of 2014. I don’t know if it deserves the Oscar, because I haven’t seen the other films that have been nominated, but I thought it was excellent, and would rate it high on my list of the best war movies ever made. Some conservatives, however, are predicting it won’t win because of Hollywood bias against patriotic war movies.
I don’t buy that. There is a fairly long list of war movies that have been nominated for Oscars in recent years, and The Hurt Locker won in 2009.
In the 1940s and ‘50s, Hollywood often glorified war and heroism with “John Wayne” type movies, but war movies made after Vietnam have tended to focus on the brutality of war, and the suffering of both the soldiers who fought them and the civilians caught in the middle. American Sniper falls into this genre. While it portrays Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, as a hero doing what he had to do to save his comrades, and it makes clear that the AQI (Al Quaida in Iraq, known today as ISIS) were “the bad guys” and U.S. soldiers “the good guys,” it doesn’t really address the politics of why our soldiers were over there. Its main theme is the emotional trauma suffered by soldiers, including Chris Kyle, and their struggle to return to a normal life.
A different issue was raised by Al Sharpton, President Obama’s unofficial Secretary of race relations, when he proclaimed it “appallingly insulting” that all 20 of the Academy Award nominations for acting went to white actors and actresses, and called an emergency meeting of his diversity task force.
Now, wait a minute. I don’t know what criteria these anonymous voters use, but everything isn’t always about race. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, blacks make up 13.2 percent of our population. That means that if you randomly select 20 persons from the population, 6 percent of the time, there will not be a black among them. This is only the third time since the civil rights movement in the 1960s that no blacks have been nominated for an acting award, which is precisely what the statistics predict.
In the last 50 years, no industry or organization has done more to dispel racial stereotypes and promote understanding among the races in America than the Hollywood film industry. At a time when most blacks and whites lived in separate communities and socialized among themselves, Hollywood made movies like The Defiant Ones, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Patch of Blue, Black Like Me, A Raisin in the Son, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Sounder, A Soldier’s Story, and The Color Purple that provided us with a window through which white America could gain cultural understanding of and empathy for black America. For Sharpton to accuse the Academy of racism is an insult to that industry.
Another film snubbed by the Academy Awards this year is Unbroken, adapted from the book written by Laura Hillenbrand, and produced and directed by Angelina Jolie. The film tells the story of Louis Zamperini, a troubled youth who took his anger out by running, and ran himself right into a place on the U.S. Olympic team for the 1936 Olympics. When the second world war broke out, Zamperini became an airman. When the bomber he was on crashed into the Pacific Ocean while on a rescue mission, he was adrift in a tiny air raft for 47 days before being “rescued” by the Japanese. He then spent nearly three years in Japanese prison camps, enduring torture and torment, in part due to his refusal to record a propaganda message for the Japanese government.
But Jolie’s film covers only half of Hillenbrand’s book. The rest of the story is how Zamparini suffered from PTSD after the war, and turned to alcohol to cope with anger and hatred for his captors until he went to a Billy Graham crusade, was saved, learned to forgive, and dedicated the rest of his life to Jesus Christ. Why did Jolie end her film with Zamperini’s return to America, and not go into the rest of his story? The explanation I prefer is that telling the whole story would have required a three-hour-plus film. Jolie does not hide the explicitly Christian undertones of Zamperini’s story, and that may have cost her and Jack O’Connell, the actor who did an excellent job portraying Zamperini, a nod from the Academy Award voters.
I know why the Saints aren’t in the Super Bowl, and why my Detroit Tigers didn’t make it to the World Series: The Saints had no defense, and the Tigers had no relief pitching. But one can only speculate about what goes through the minds of the anonymous voters of the American Academy of Film Arts and Sciences.
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