[p2p-research] Fwd: ZNet Daily Commentary: Why the Oscars are a Con By John Pilger

[Michel Bauwens]

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Subject: ZNet Daily Commentary: Why the Oscars are a Con By John Pilger
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Why the Oscars are a Con

February 10, 2010 By *John Pilger*


John Pilger's ZSpace Page <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/johnpilger>/
ZSpace <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/>


Why are so many films so bad? This year's Oscar nominations are a parade of
propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as
old as Hollywood: America's divine right to invade other societies, steal
their history and occupy our memory. When will directors and writers behave
like artists and not pimps for a world view devoted to control and
destruction?

I grew up on the movie myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough
unless you happened to be a native American. The formula is unchanged.
Self-regarding distortions present the nobility of the American colonial
aggressor as a cover for massacre, from the Philippines to Iraq. I only
fully understood the power of the con when I was sent to Vietnam as a war
reporter. The Vietnamese were "gooks" and "Indians" whose industrial murder
was preordained in John Wayne movies and sent back to Hollywood to
glamourise or redeem.

I use the word murder advisedly, because what Hollywood does brilliantly is
suppress the truth about America's assaults. These are not wars, but the
export of a gun-addicted, homicidal "culture". And when the notion of
psychopaths as heroes wears thin, the bloodbath becomes an "American
tragedy" with a soundtrack of pure angst.

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is in this tradition. A favourite for
multiple Oscars, her film is "better than any documentary I've seen on the
Iraq war. It's so real it's scary" (Paul Chambers CNN). Peter Bradshaw in
the Guardian reckons it has "unpretentious clarity" and is "about the long
and painful endgame in Iraq" that "says more about the agony and wrong and
tragedy of war than all those earnest well-meaning movies".

What nonsense.  Her film offers a vicarious thrill via yet another
standard-issue psychopath high on violence in somebody else's country where
the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion. The hype
around Bigelow is that she may be the first female director to win an Oscar.
How insulting that a woman is celebrated for a typically violent all-male
war movie.

The accolades echo those for The Deer Hunter (1978) which critics acclaimed
as "the film that could purge a nation's guilt!"  The Deer Hunter lauded
those who had caused the deaths of more than three million Vietnamese while
reducing those who resisted to barbaric commie stick figures. In 2001,
Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down provided a similar, if less subtle catharsis
for another American "noble failure" in Somalia while airbrushing the
heroes' massacre of up to 10,000 Somalis.

By contrast, the fate of an admirable American war film, Redacted, is
instructive. Made in 2007 by Brian De Palma, the film is based on the true
story of the gang rape of an Iraqi teenager and the murder of her family by
American soldiers.  There is no heroism, no purgative. The murderers are
murderers, and the complicity of Hollywood and the media in the epic crime
in Iraq is described ingeniously by De Palma. The film ends with a series of
photographs of Iraqi civilians who were killed. When it was order that their
faces be ordered blacked out "for legal reasons", De Palma said, "I think
that's terrible because now we have not even given the dignity of faces to
this suffering people. The great irony about Redacted is that it was
redacted." After a limited release in the US, this fine film all but
vanished.

Non-American (or non-western) humanity is not deemed to have box office
appeal, dead or alive. They are the "other" who are allowed, at best, to be
saved by "us". In Avatar, James Cameron's vast and violent money-printer,
3-D noble savages known as the Na'vi need a good guy American soldier,
Sergeant Jake Sully, to save them. This confirms they are "good". Natch.

My Oscar for the worst of the current nominees goes to Invictus, Clint
Eastwood's unctuous insult to the struggle against apartheid in South
Africa. Taken from a hagiography of Nelson Mandela by a British journalist,
John Carlin, the film might have been a product of apartheid propaganda. In
promoting the racist, thuggish rugby culture as a panacea of the "rainbow
nation", Eastwood gives barely a hint that many black South Africans were
deeply embarrassed and hurt by Mandela's embrace of the hated Springbok
symbol of their suffering. He airbrushes white violence - but not black
violence, which is ever present as a threat. As for the Boer racists, they
have hearts of gold, because "we didn't really know". The subliminal theme
is all too familiar: colonialism deserves forgiveness and accommodation,
never justice.

At first I thought Invictus, could not be taken seriously, then I looked
around the cinema at young people and others for whom the horrors of
apartheid have no reference, and I understood the damage such a slick
travesty does to our memory and its moral lessons. Imagine Eastwood making a
happy-Sambo equivalent in the American Deep South. He would not dare.

The film most nominated for an Oscar and promoted by the critics is Up in
the Air, which has George Clooney as a man who travels America sacking
people and collecting frequent flyer points. Before the triteness dissolves
into sentimentality, every stereotype is summoned, especially of women.
There is a bitch, a saint and a cheat. However, this is "a movie for our
times", says the director Jason Reitman, who boasts having cast real sacked
people. "We interviewed them about what it was like to lose their job in
this economy," said he, "then we'd fire them on camera and ask them to
respond the way they did when they lost their job. It was an incredible
experience to watch these non-actors with 100 per cent realism."

Wow, what a winner.
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