Diluting Oscar
by Renny Hartmann
Issue 105 - April 9, 2008

I fell in love with the movies when I was about five and my parents took me to see an Abbott and Costello movie. There was no TV yet, and the moving characters on that huge screen were like a living day dream. I still see 30-40 movies a year, nearly every week. But only one of the esteemed Oscar nominees even played in my county, the George Clooney pix--which was a nice film but no more worthy of an Oscar nomination than my mixed collie dog's being nominated to the Westminster Kennel Club.

No one I know of saw all the best picture candidates this year, partly because few were in general distribution or played nationally. When years ago the Academy in its wisdom chose " Fargo" as a contestant, I stopped watching the Oscar broadcasts. Fargo was another senseless exercise in bloodletting supposedly forward looking for featuring a pregnant chief of police lumbering around in the snow as an icon of feminism.

"Crash" was a direct descendant of Fargo, nearly plotless, all heartless, and actually a perfect example of bait and switch marketing. At first, Crash was promoted in previews as a comedy featuring Sandra Bullock. When the film reached commercial screens, audiences could immediately see Ms. Bullock vanished from the movie in a few seconds, and every other character was a racist, sexist, drug dealer, corrupt cop, yadda with no possibly redeeming values. Then, as with "Natural Born Killers," the pr started offering Crash as satire, a scathing comment on modern society, a masterful "ensemble" production worthy of the highest praise.

It probably derives from California's culture where everyone simply hates everyone, ending up incomprehensible. After all, celebrities hate intrusive gardeners and snoopy detectives, so they identified beautifully with the negative, vile dialogue and characters' manners. It was just like home. But Crash was a miserable movie, and if anyone mentions it today as an Oscar winner, he/she will mostly receive vague and blank stares from people who never saw it then and haven't heard of it since. And there's the rub, as Hamlet would say. Picking Oscar choices from poorly-performing movies that audiences have not embraced or never had the opportunity to see cheapens and lessens the worth of the Oscars. If the Academy wants the Oscars to be a foreign film awards show, they should change the name and venue. They are killing the goose with the golden egg.

Young people do not go to theatrical movies. They are watching YouTube and their iPods. They are not developing an aesthetic for appreciating the magic that appears on the silver screen, which will eventually lead to the demise of the film experience. Hollywood should pay attention.

Renny Hartmann is an adjunct college professor in New Jersey