The Hollywood Establishment: It really IS lousy with Democrats

-- Democrats of the craven, cowardly, quaking-before-the-right variety.

At the end of the kind of tame Oscar telecast we would have expected in 2002, the overrated, pretentious Crash walked off with the Academy Award for Best Picture.

And today the Christofascist Zombie Brigade is smiling, because today it feels vindicated in its hatred of gays, its nonsensical view that if two men love each other, or two women who aren't making a porn movie for their titillation love each other, it somehow threatens Western Civilization.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had a very real opportunity to put the equivalent of a notary stamp on a society that is changing whether the Christofascists and the dinosaurs who run the Academy want to believe it or not. And they punted.

I've seen all of the Best Picture nominees. Four of them are superlative films. I could have been happy with any of the four winning. Crash is not one of those four. I was underwhemled by this film when I saw it last year, and the clips that have been played in heavy rotation during this awards race have made me dislike the film even more than I did then. It could be argued that Crash is the reason I decided I didn't enjoy writing about movies anymore. It was so ponderous and so full of its own self-importance, it embodies in its hour and forty minutes of run time everything that's self-congratulatory and self-conscious of Hollywood liberalism.

Last night could have been the night in which Hollywood wears its liberal mantle proudly; the night in which it could have taken back the expression "Hollywood Liberal" the way gays have taken back the word "queer". It took a tentative step when it nominated THREE films with GLBT themes for best picture -- but the Academy lacked the courage to see it through. The night started out promisingly with a terrific montage that completely skewered the myth that films with western themes have always been about macho, hetero men. It was funny and pointed, and promised an evening in which Hollywood would take its stand -- an evening which never came. I guess my first clue should have been Charlize Theron sitting there stone-faced at everything Jon Stewart said.

But just like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi rattling their sabers at Howard Dean before caving to everything the Republicans want, there was only so far the film community was willing to go.

This isn't the first time that an inferior film was won Best Picture, and it won't be the last. But this may be the first opportunity in a long time Hollywood has had to really make a statement in front of a global audience -- and it couldn't find the courage to do it. Instead it bestowed the crown on one of the most cliché-ridden, namby-pamby, "look at how we're talking endlessly about racism aren't we progressive" products to come out of Hollywood in recent years. On a night in which the Three 6 Mafia won Best Song, I guess that was as far as they were willing to go next year.

Kenneth Turan in the L.A. Times:

I don't care how much trouble "Crash" had getting financing or getting people on board, the reality of this film, the reason it won the best picture Oscar, is that it is, at its core, a standard Hollywood movie, as manipulative and unrealistic as the day is long. And something more.

For "Crash's" biggest asset is its ability to give people a carload of those standard Hollywood satisfactions but make them think they are seeing something groundbreaking and daring. It is, in some ways, a feel-good film about racism, a film you could see and feel like a better person, a film that could make you believe that you had done your moral duty and examined your soul when in fact you were just getting your buttons pushed and your preconceptions reconfirmed.

So for people who were discomfited by "Brokeback Mountain" but wanted to be able to look themselves in the mirror and feel like they were good, productive liberals, "Crash" provided the perfect safe harbor. They could vote for it in good conscience, vote for it and feel they had made a progressive move, vote for it and not feel that there was any stain on their liberal credentials for shunning what "Brokeback" had to offer. And that's exactly what they did.

"Brokeback," it is worth noting, was in some ways the tamest of the discomforting films available to Oscar voters in various categories. Steven Spielberg's "Munich"; the Palestinian Territories' "Paradise Now," one of the best foreign language nominees; and the documentary nominee "Darwin's Nightmare" offered scenarios that truly shook up people's normal ways of seeing the world. None of them won a thing.

Hollywood, of course, is under no obligation to be a progressive force in the world. It is in the business of entertainment, in the business of making the most dollars it can. Yes, on Oscar night, it likes to pat itself on the back for the good it does in the world, but as Sunday night's ceremony proved, it is easier to congratulate yourself for a job well done in the past than actually do that job in the present.

When you think about the risk that Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger took in terms of their career potential to make Brokeback Mountain, when you think about the courage of Focus Features in making and distributing this film, when you think about just how IMPORTANT this film has been to so many people and about its power to change minds, when you think about how it's played strongly almost everywhere; that Hollywood still thought America wasn't "ready" is both disturbing and depressing.

Of course today the Christofascist Zombie Brigade is going to be all over the news shows talking about how this vindicates their view that America does not want to see its theatrical screens defiled by gay men -- unless said gay men are decently closeted, like oh, say, a certain current box office star whose name I shall not mention here. They will regard this as the final nail in the coffin of the so-called "gay agenda."

I wish there was something I could say today to ModFab and Nick and Nat and Pam and Shelly and the millions of gay Americans who are very real people experiencing very real pain today at how a community that was supposed to be on their side slapped them in the face last night.