Why The Oscars Are A Con – John Pilger
February 10th, 2010
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.
www.johnpilger.com
Source: Information Clearing House
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February 10th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
Pilger missed out on the hollycaust films cleaning up most of the Oscars (actually merits for hibitual lying prize)
February 10th, 2010 at 7:42 pm
LIkewise, UP IN THE AIR is considered a ”comedy“? About putting people out of their jobs? Oh, that’s so funny to you? Where is Preston Sturges when we need him?
For more on my take on this go to:
http://wp.me/sKBYM-709
February 10th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
One need say no more than Project Mocking Bird
February 10th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
I had read comments about avatar before going to see it, the idea of the colonialist rescuing the natives initially stopped me. Having now seen the film, there would be few ways for the natives to win against such a technological divide without inside knowledge. Perhaps the main fault of the film is that it ends before the reprisals from the vanquished, showing in turn the real cost of the resistance.
Afghanistan and Gaza provide a window into what happens in such cases. While on the one hand the Taliban are excellent fighters and are certainly holding their own against the occupiers, this is only occurring because this is a half hearted war on the part of the west. For political reasons we have not simply destroyed the country and all its inhabitants. Gaza on the other hand demonstrates what happens when natives resist occupiers who are a little more bullish – though again for political reasons the massacres are kept small and the occupation drags while the costs mount.
While Hollywood will continue producing trash to prop up our ugly small minded greed ridden culture. The reality unfortunately is few cultures are above such actions. If we were at the disadvantage then we would be the occupied enjoying our meals with the dust from the enemies DU weapons. Until we develop a system of coordination that does not reward the determination of the psychopaths and the fools then this is as good as it gets. Hollywood reflects this, it is as trapped as we are.
February 10th, 2010 at 11:50 pm
While I agree with most of this, you fall prey to the PC Propaganda of
“aparthide” SA.
Look at the violence against whites
that is rampant, and hidden in thier PC media now.
Murders of whole families simply because they’re white.
You want to be truthful, than be fully truthful.
Don’t get it in one area, and lose it in the next.
February 11th, 2010 at 12:19 am
I hated “Up In the Air”. Trite, cloying and phony B/S. This expensive claptrap says it doesn’t matter if you get fired from your job. Your spouse and children will make it less of a tragedy.
Really? Tell it to those who’ve lost and are losing their homes, the growing number of those living in tent cities or cardboard boxes, the raped homeless women, the growing number of children suffering from malnutrition, the overwhelmed free clinics, those dying for lack of insurance, or denied coverage for “pre-existing” condition. And those who know what’s coming and chose suicide. I expect the Clown in Chief thinks he’ll find an answer to all this on one of his teleprompters…
This picture is an obvious and bad piece of propaganda made by rich men without a clue.
Btw: “Redacted” can be seen on Google’s Video website (http://video.google.com). While you’re at it, check out Adam Curtis’s phenomenal docus made for the BBC: “The Trap”, “The Century of the Self”, “The Power of Nightmares”, “Pandora’s Box”) that explain how we ended up leaning so far over the cliff’s edge.
February 11th, 2010 at 1:28 am
OSCARS WORSE than “CON” they are PSY-OPS
For psychological warefare propaganda.
Virtually all films depicting war will not acknowledge the fact the so-called “war on terror” is not just clearly immoral but an illegal fraud and genocide kick-started by a proven 9/11 coverup that 9/11 investigation chairs Kean and Hamiltion said was “set up to fail” “Stonewalled by the C.I.A.” to such a blatant degree “We call that obstruction” (NY Times 1/2/2008). Max Cleland who resigned from the 9/11 Commission called the entire thing “a scam” and “a national scandal”.
According to the Center for Public Integrity – the 9/11 inspired “war on terror” (that has destroyed over a million lives in Iraq alone) was promoted out of Washington, and enabled through the corporate media / Hollywood circus by almost 1,000 blatant lies as of January 2008.
That said I would argue that “Avatar” is not a film about “noble savages known as the Na’vi need a good guy American soldier, Sergeant Jake Sully, to save them”. It’s about an American soldier that trades in his mindless past and literally becomes one of the “noble savages” and the enemy of corporate fascism that kills the freedom and decency he wants to be part of.
Strange that the only war film that actually condemns a de facto monopoly Fascist establishment order would be a science fiction fantasy set in the far future.
February 11th, 2010 at 1:44 am
Hollywood always was meant to be a propaganda tool. They seldom followed the plot of any books they interpreted. They often made “lite of” and whitewashed seious topics. Too often, they changed the history to make heros out of villains.
February 11th, 2010 at 2:22 am
The ultimate form of control is controlling perception of reality
Hence the subtle genius of propaganda and controlling perceptions of our world through the media and entertainment
The answer lies in reclaiming our perceptions and choosing a reality that serves our communities and our families, but especially ourselves
February 11th, 2010 at 5:39 am
Jules,
“noble savages” and the enemy of corporate fascism that kills the freedom and decency he wants to be part of.” ??
The real enemy is “Corporate Internationalism,” unless one believes that the deep riddled American Capitalist USA Depression prior to WW II, a British Empire on the verge of collapse and a barbaric murderous Communist Soviet Union as a heroic tale than we need to go back to rereading and redefining the concept of Fascism as “Nationalism.” A Vichy France was never “occupied” by Germany. Spain, Portugal and Ireland were neutral. Italy, Nationalist China, India…etc. “Fascism” will become fashionable again. Especially now when more people are realizing the Holohoax scam and the International Banker swindle that has exposed them as the thief’s and murderers they are.
I haven’t watched a Hollywood Film in years. It’s all subliminal propaganda.
I like John Pilger. Especially since I’m a Vietnam Era Veteran. He was one of the few journalist
who saw things as they were. No propaganda from this great reporter.
February 11th, 2010 at 10:49 am
Hmmm
Perhaps most instructive for the people of the world with regard to any of the hollywood
“awards” would be a detailed analysis of exactly who it is that actually gets to decide.
That insight would surely shock most people. Because clearly one particular group is hugely
over represented. This voting block explains why certain themes and individuals consistently recieve “awards” they clearly do not deserve. Power corrupts, absolute power….