Time once again for Hollywood to parade itself on prime-time television before an unimpressed nation and make a collective fool of itself. That’s my usual ho-hum feeling about Academy Awards night whenever the annual feast of self-aggrandisement heaves into view. Every year, it looks more and more like some tired old variety show or a lodge meeting on acid, with naff musical numbers, hurried speeches and a ghoulish listing of the lately dead.
Oscar night is a moment when main-street America can catch its unvarnished glimpse of Sodom-by-the-Sea and shudder at its liberal politics, its sexual degeneracy and its pernicious plans for our children.
Usually the nominees will include some flashpoint names, such as Michael Moore or Tim Robbins, guaranteed to excite the right into ecstasies of denunciation. This year, the entire slate seems to have been coordinated, almost nomination by nomination, to provoke the maximum degree of outrage in nearly every major constituency of the establishment right.
For starters, two years after the most (or was it just the first?) homophobic presidential election in American history, it warms the heart to note that these are officially the Gayest Oscars Ever. And what’s most amusing is that the gay-themed movies actually take homosexuality directly into the red states.
Brokeback Mountain really is the movie of the cultural moment, and gay cowboys are an irresistible metaphor for the state of gayness in the United States. Religious right leaders decided not to dignify it with a boycott, aiming instead to let it rot in the multiplexes. It wouldn’t have made a whit of difference — most Americans have passed their sort by. Brokeback Mountain‘s broad-based acceptance proves it — and, in this instance, Hollywood is far closer to the mainstream than the media gives it credit for.
Then there’s Capote, featuring Phil Hoffman’s eerie reincarnation of weird, whiny Truman, a decidedly foreign object arriving in 1959 Kansas — a state in thrall today to the religious right and intelligent design, and where one joke says the border signs read: ”Welcome to Kansas: please put your clocks back 100 years” — to fall in love with a death row-bound murderer.
If that doesn’t creep out the homophobes then TransAmerica, starring Desperate Housewife Felicity Huffman in gender-hopping mode, ought to get the job done. I imagine some outraged plutocrat in his crony-filled boardroom wailing: ”They took the name of a perfectly beautiful multinational insurance conglomerate and turned it into something DIRTY!”
The heartland thus outraged, the Academy turns its attention to the neo-cons, who made extensive preemptive strikes against Steven Spielberg’s Munich, accusing it of political naivety and the dread sin of moral equivalency, before it was even released. Just for balance, the foreign film category includes Paradise Now, a portrait of Palestinian suicide bombers that actually won a Golden Globe.
And handsome George Clooney, oft pilloried on Fox News for his amiable centrist decency, is everywhere. Over here he is bitch-slapping the McCarthyite right and, by implication, the corporate media of 2006 in Good Night, and Good Luck. And over there he’s outlining the finer idiocies of US oil policy in lumbering Syriana.
On the big night, he’ll probably be hobnobbing with fellow bêtes noires of the right such as Robert Altman (a son of Kansas), who’s getting his lifetime achievement award, or with new host Jon Stewart, the foremost political satirist on the US left today.
The big irony is that the one red-state movie of the bunch — the lightweight but enormously likable Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line — will probably walk away with the big statuettes, thus proving that Hollywood is no different from the rest of the country, after all. — Â