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A Shameful Oscar Night
Posted by Tiglath (Guest) davidchibo@hotmail.com - Thursday, December 4 2003, 9:59:50 (EST)
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A Shameful Oscar Night

March 30, 2003

By now, the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should have recovered from last week's Oscar upsets, from the counter-intuitive proposition that too much promotion can actually backfire (see "Chicago") and, of course, from Red Carpet Envy. What they might not be over is Michael Moore.

Maybe I blinked, but I had no idea when the smoke cleared after Moore dropped his Bush bomb at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre whether there had been many people booing and a few people cheering, or many people standing and a few loudmouths booing, or whether a barometric reading of Hollywood's political mood could be taken from the affair at all.

Moore alleged afterward that it was a handful of jeers and a cheering throng. Others who were there say otherwise. It would be nice to know definitively, because the state of Hollywood currently seems to hover somewhere between paranoia and nervous exhaustion.

One trade journalist I know said that the tepid nature of Oscar night and the reluctance of the attending stars to make anything but the most innocuous of political statements (including Adrien Brody's, a plea for world peace that could have been on a Hallmark card) simply reflected the fact that Hollywood is full of rich people who vote Republican and are watching the bottom line. No one wants organized boycotts of movies featuring outspoken liberal movie stars; no one wants to be tagged as an outspoken liberal movie star if his or her movies are going to be boycotted.

It was, as a result, a shameful night for Hollywood, and whether one likes Moore - and he can be, to put it mildly, a little overbearing - what he did last week needed doing. The producers of the Oscar show had clamped down so hard on its cast even Susan Sarandon agreed to be gagged. What were they all threatened with, having to drink tap water? No, probably just the idea that Hollywood is in such a tenuous place vis-a-vis the political mood of the country that any really inflammatory statements about bombing Iraq might end up cutting seriously into the profit margin.

The right is organized; anti-celebrity Web sites are up and running. The myth of a liberal media continues to be promoted by reactionary outlets like Fox News. CNN has become the marketing department of the Bush administration. The only place you hear any widely broadcast dissent is when a celebrity makes a statement.

Yet, the academy decided to censor itself. The Oscars have long been a platform for all kinds of political grandstanding, from Vanessa Redgrave's pro-PLO statements to Marlon Brando's Sasheen Littlefeather charade on behalf of the American Indian movement. Suddenly, freedom of speech is in bad taste?

Moore, of course, has never been part of Hollywood, apparently couldn't care less about it (though he seemed pleased to get the documentary Oscar) and actually had to act out, because he's got an image to maintain. And said image has nothing to do with appeasing George W. Bush.

But like him or not, he knows what he's talking about. It's understandable, certainly, to get annoyed when a celebrity of, shall we say, limited knowledge, if not intelligence, decides to weigh in on matters of global importance. One would probably blanch if Britney Spears proposed changes in policy at the World Bank. But war is a little different; it affects everyone. All U.S. citizens are morally culpable in what happens in and to Iraq. If you were onstage before a worldwide audience of more than one billion people, wouldn't you feel a moral obligation to condemn something you saw as a violation of human rights, the democratic process and global diplomacy? That is, if that's the way you saw it?

All this outrage over celebrity politics does not, it seems, flow both ways. No one seems particularly outraged when committed conservatives like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis or gun advocate Tom Selleck or their spiritual grandfather, Charlton Heston, air their views, however offensive they are to a large number of Americans. But such is the impotence of what is generally called the "celebrity left" in this country that they can't even mount an argument for dissent.

And when the White House is so fond of claiming our enemies hate us for our freedoms, why do so many people get so excited when a celebrity exercises one? What are we fighting for, if not the right of silly people to speak their minds? Surely, if there were a constitutional Amendment regarding the right to make movies, I'd vote to have it rescinded immediately (in selective cases, of course). The muffling of Hollywood, however, is something far more dangerous.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.



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