Hollywood's Big Ho-Hum

Having recently written about the politicization of various awards, I decided to sit in on Sunday night's Academy Awards just to verify that my criticism was justified. All I can say to those who wrote to me vociferously denying the politicization of awards such as the Oscars^TM is that one would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to recoil from the orgy of liberal self-congratulation on display.

As predicted, former Vice-President Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth won the award for Best Documentary. All political messages aside, the documentary itself (which I forced myself to sit through for the purposes of an article) had no filmmaking merit whatsoever and this award was an insult to all those documentarians that actually try to produce quality work. But the Oscar^TM was indeed all about politics, as Gore's not-so-hilarious jokes about running for president in 2008 indicated. It was patronage awarding at its best.

Cinnamon Stillwell

Hollyweird's annual liberal hugfest seems to be more and more of an inside joke every year. Talent is no longer a necessity to win the acclaim of one's peers in the film industry. A simple willingness to mouth the party line and an attempt at couching the approved agit-prop in proper terms of cool are all that is necessary. In fact, I would almost say mediocrity is a prerequisite and talent a hindrance.