Post-Oscars thread…

Updated on February 28, 2011 By Ken Begg 53 Comments

I really don’t give a rat’s ass about the Oscars, probably because American film as a whole has been on the decline for decades now. Indeed, I forgot they were on last night until I saw a story about them on the news this morning.

Here are the Best Picture Winners of the ’70s:

1979 – “Kramer vs. Kramer”

1978 – “The Deer Hunter”

1977 – “Annie Hall”

1976 – “Rocky”

1975 – “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”

1974 – “The Godfather Part II”

1973 – “The Sting”

1972 – “The Godfather”

1971 – “The French Connection”

1970 – “Patton”

Here are the Best Picture Winners of the Aughts:

2009 – “The Hurt Locker”

2008 – “Slumdog Millionaire”

2007 – “No Country for Old Men”

2006 – “The Departed”

2005 – “Crash”

2004 – “Million Dollar Baby”

2003 – “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”

2002 – “Chicago”

2001 – “A Beautiful Mind”

2000 – “Gladiator”

Who thinks the 2000s roster of winners will be as well remembered and still watched 40 years from now as the ’70s films are today? Maybe Lord of the Rings, but other than that?

About the only thing I’d kind of interested in is seeing the voting percentages for the (ha!) ten nominees for Best Picture. Did King’s Speech get 30 or 40%, or just 12 or 15% with most of the films drawing roughly even totals?

Anyhoo, maybe some of you aren’t as bored with them as I am, and if so, have at it below.

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  • When ‘Saving Private Ryan’ lost to ‘Shakespeare In Love’ for best picture, thats when I officially gave up on the Oscars.

  • BeckoningChasm

    I have zero interest in the Oscars. For decades, they’ve seemed to be a way for Hollywood to pat itself on the back about how “brave” and “progressive” they are, and how they’re not afraid to “speak truth to power” etc etc.

    As for what will survive from the aughts, yeah, maybe “Lord of the Rings” but we seem to have entered an age when films are utterly forgotten six weeks after they’ve been released on DVD. Even a hugely successful film like “The Dark Knight” rarely gets a mention nowadays, unless there’s news of a sequel in the works.

  • The only movie award I care about is the Hong Kong Movie Award for Best Action Choreography.

  • Ericb

    Only the Grammy awards are more useless than the Oscar.

  • Tork_110

    Toy Story 3 won an Oscar. So there’s that.

    Also, even if he’s done with the Star Wars reviews, I hope Harry Plinkett rubs Portman’s Oscar in Lucas’s face.

  • alex

    Ordinary People winning over Raging Bull in 1980. WTF was that?

  • rizzo

    Not sure what the point of expanding the number of films in the Best Motion Picture category was if they’re still going to pick the usual Oscar bait films as the winners. And Crash? Come the hell on.

  • Rock Baker

    I care not. Why bother? I’ll stick with the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards. At least I can vote in those!

  • Mr. Rational

    “Not sure what the point of expanding the number of films in the Best Motion Picture category was if they’re still going to pick the usual Oscar bait films as the winners.”

    The point is to get your hopes up that an actual film you actually went to see might win an actual serious Oscar.

  • roger h

    Kramer vs. Kramer ruined the Oscars for me.

  • Well, the Academy used to more or less alternate short runs of big ‘epic’ movies with smaller, more personal dramas (and still might today; I’d have to run down the list). Kramer vs. Kramer might have lost another year, although it was followed by a similar movie, Ordinary People. It’s like how somebody will win a best acting or directing award for a film everyone knows wasn’t their best work; it’s just that it’s their ‘turn.’

  • tim

    even lord of the rings won’t be remembered in 40 years, because they’ll have rebooted the franchise by then.

  • Rock Baker

    I haven’t seen Lord of the Rings, but it its good, it might last. King Kong is still deservedly remembered despite the numerous re-workings. That one has held on for 70 years! (And then there’s The Lost World. Despite countless other films by that name, the 1925 release remains the best known and championed.)

    Say, can anyone tell me why I can’t access the ‘old’ Jabootu? I haven’t been able to load that site for two days now.

  • Rock — Boy, I don’t know. Maybe we finally lost our lease.

  • Toby Clark

    “About the only thing I’d kind of interested in is seeing the voting percentages for the (ha!) ten nominees for Best Picture. Did King’s Speech get 30 or 40%, or just 12 or 15% with most of the films drawing roughly even totals?”

    Yeah, this is why I tend to get more annoyed by nomination snubs than award snubs. This year it was Christopher Nolan not even being nominated for Best Director (You just know he’s going to get a consolation award one day, for Inception, The Dark Knight, The Prestige and Memento), and Scott Pilgrim being ignored entirely. Seriously, not even for Visual Effects or Editing?!

    Also, I was mildly annoyed that Jackie Weaver got a nomination but Caitlin Stasey didn’t.

    I will say I was immensely satisfied with Aaron Sorkin’s win though.

  • sardu

    The absolute gentlest way I know to put it is that the Oscars ™ are a public display of an industry bending over and fellating itself. Apparently some people are into that.

  • P Stroud

    I gave up when I saw that the best movie of last year, “Machete”, didn’t even get nominated.

  • P Stroud

    But seriously. Alfred Hitchcock never won an Oscar. There is no director more studied and channeled than Hitchcock. That says all you need to know about the Oscars. Personally, I believe the reason he never won was that he was an anti-communist…. a major sin in Hollywood.

  • The Rev.

    I went to the old site, and didn’t have any trouble getting there. I dunno if it’s an issue on Rock’s end or what.

  • I think we were having a service issue. I emailed Techmaster Paul out in California, and he must have gotten the matter resolved. Thanks, Rock, for mentioning it.

  • alex

    P Stroud if anti-communism is a sin in Hollywood would you care to explain why people got blacklisted in the Fifties?

  • Alex — Depends on the timeframe. Look at the ‘controversy’ over giving Elia Kazan a clearly warranted life-time achievement Oscar. And it wasn’t studio heads voting for Oscars, but the rank and file, of which there have long been a sizable number of outright Reds and fellow travelers. It’s not like the Hollywood Ten were innocent of being communists, after all, and yet now they’re lionized as heroes while Hollywood continues to churn out films about the ‘witch hunts’ and ‘paranoia’ of the ’50s.

    Hollywood Party by Kenneth Billingsley is a good book for anyone interested in the topic.

  • alex

    I’m on the side of John Ford who, when Cecil B DeMille was conducting his own little witchunt on Joseph Mankiewicz at a DGA meeting, told De Mille to his face ‘I don’t like you CB, I don’t like what you stand for and I don’t like what you’ve been saying here tonight.’

    The Red Scare in Hollywood in that era was a good excuse for stabbing people in the back and power games. They were commies in Hollywood and they were also fascists. But most people were neither. Those blacklisted people were no threat to anybody.

  • Put me in Glenn Reynold’s camp: “Communists are as bad as Nazis, and their defenders and apologists are as bad as Nazis’ defenders, but far more common. When you meet them, show them no respect. They’re evil, stupid, and dishonest. They should not enjoy the consequences of their behavior.”

    I’m pretty sure if somebody in the film industry was found to be a member of, say, the KKK, he would be fired and unable to work in the industry. (Same if you were a member of the Bund back in the ’30s, which is a more exact parallel.) Being a KKKer is not more vile than being a communist, especially looking at the larger picture of the 100,000,000 plus corpses communism left behind in less than a century.

    If your argument is that people who weren’t communists were persecuted, fine. I’m more than willing to look at the evidence regarding such discreet individuals. However, I’ve seen people rabidly defending and lionizing such outright, unrepentant lifelong communists as Gale Sondergaard, and frankly it makes me sick. Reynolds is right; she should be treated exactly like if she were a Nazi, and people defending her treated like they were defending Nazis.

  • alex

    I don’t see how going after peole like Dalton Trumbo and Abraham Polonsky has anything to do with fighting communism or protecting America. The power in Hollywood was in the hand of the studios bosses. If one of them was a red than OK let’s investigate. But to go after writers and directors because they had once joined the communist party or attended a few meetings was nonsense.

  • Rock Baker

    The battle against the reds in Hollywood could’ve been fought with more polish, but the cause was just (and it literally turns my stomach to hear outted commies being, at worst, praised, and, at best, having their evilness downplayed as being little more than paranoia from the right). Hollywood is ‘in enemy hands’ today, and the result is a field focused less on entertainment than indoctrination. I’d say HUAAC’s fears have come true. (please forgive the spelling)

    I got back into the old website, so thanks for fixing that, Ken! (I just find the old site more pleasing to the eye, it worried me to think it’d be gone for good.)

  • Alex — So you don’t agree that if someone now were similarly found to be a member of the KKK, they would be so fired today? Hell, you had people fired and persecuted recently for donating to the ‘wrong’ side (i.e., the majority one) on California’s gay marriage-related Proposition 8. You’re also speaking of an industry where people actually fear admitting they voted for George Bush, as did half the country, lest it adversely effect their career.

    If your position is that nobody should ever lose a public sector job because of their noxious personal politics, I’ll commend your consistency, even if I disagree with you. If you’re saying that communists shouldn’t be judged as harshly as holders of other noxious ideologies, even when they did so back in the height of the Cold War when the Soviet Union was a vital enemy, of the US, then I’d have to say you’re on far shakier ground.

    Also, Trumbo and Polonsky were far more active communist agitators then you imply. Trumbo, for instance, gave interviews to the Daily Worker bragging about anti-communist film projects that the party got squashed. Meanwhile, Polonsky said in interviews well after the fact that he “had no regrets” regarding his communist activities. Please don’t attempt to whitewash the facts about what they guys were. Either they deserved to keep their jobs despite being willing what Stalin himself called “useful idiots,” i.e., informed scumbag lackies for the single most murderous ideology humankind has yet formulated (which is the kindest take you can have on the matter), or they didn’t. The facts aren’t in dispute, though. These were not innocents. If they ever repented their communism, I’ve never heard about it. It would be nice to think they did eventually come to their senses, but more likely they just drank up the accolades about their ‘bravery’, while those who did the right thing, like Kazan, were demonized decades afterward.

  • Sandy Petersen

    I guess since I read and enjoy works by Lovecraft, Aleister Crowley, Ernst Junger, G. B. Shaw, and H. G. Wells, all of whom espoused attitudes which I find detestible, I don’t really see why Gale Sondergaard should be denied work in Hollywood, despite the fact that her politics were contemptible. Believing in communism is no crime – it’s just retarded and morally repugnant. Anyway, Hollywood has proven amply able to be morally repugnant without reference to politics at all.

  • Sandy — I think your position would rather more defensible if it worked that way for whatever political views one had. But as we know, it doesn’t. Let’s admit it, there are a lot of people who will rag on Mark Twain for being insufficiently progressive on racial issues (which he really was, given his time period), but at the same time hail people like Trumbo and Paul Robeson (who proudly accepted the Stalin Peace Prize and wrote a loving eulogy called “To You Beloved Comrade” to Uncle Joe–aka history’s greatest mass murderer) as heroes and role models. I know you would never do that, so it’s a different argument.

    And I completely concur with you, being a communist was not a crime. I’m not advocating that they should have done jail time purely because of their political beliefs. However, at the same time you obviously don’t have a right to make millions of dollars working for a private company if you’re doing something actively evil. I’m not kidding about the KKK comparison, because I don’t see how one is better than the other. Although being a communist when Stalin and Mao was active was surely effectively worse than being a KKKer now, when they are disdained society-wide and have absolutely no political power whatsoever.

    I guess I would also feel differently if their communism wasn’t always written off as a harmless quirk at best, or a sign of noble ‘bravery’ (Hollywood’s favorite accolade for it’s own) at worst. Whenever any film one of these worked on plays on, for instance, TCM, they ALWAYS lionize these guys as brave, utterly innocent victims. Let people across the board start frankly acknowledging what scumbags these guys are, and then maybe we can start putting their politics aside when we examine their works.

    Look, some people will not forgive Michael Vick as long as he lives. I won’t forgive people like Trumbo, who never repented of his beliefs. The difference is that nobody sane is actually defending Vick, while lots and lots of people think it’s quite neato-keen to put up Che Guevara posters in their house, much less laud the Hollywood Ten. It’s time to get the real story out there, and that’s not going to happen as long as we pussycat around what these people were.

  • Rock Baker

    You’re right, Ken, but I don’t see frankness about the subject coming anytime soon. First we have to undo the 50+ years of whitewash that’s been put on commie activity within the United States. Speaking openly against communism today can get you just as much trouble as speaking in favor of it could get you in the 50s. The world has been turned upside down, and dare I say the reds have a lot to do with the current mess we’re in.

  • zombiewhacker

    Anyway, I loved Kramer v. Kramer and don’t see why you guys are picking on it. If you really want to rag on a Dustin Hoffman movie that won Best Picture, pick Midnight Cowboy. Ugghh!

  • Aussiesmurf

    I am very deliberately steering clear of the political content of this thread, partly because I don’t think my point of view could be coherently or properly summarised in a few lines.

    But I’ll be brave, and make a more controversial statement. I am a (self-described) film devotee, and I quite seriously believe that, when you consider all aspects of filmcraft, Shakespeare in Love is a better-made and more more entertaining movie than Saving Private Ryan.

  • Toby Clark

    Aussiesmurf: Since I haven’t seen either of those, can I follow up by saying that I thought Crash deserved Best Picture more than Brokeback Mountain? (Heath totally deserved Best Actor though.)

    And while I was angry that The Dark Knight and WALL-E were ignored in 2008 I still would have preferred Slumdog Millionaire even if they weren’t.

  • Aussiesmurf

    Here’s an interesting exercise. Ken compares the 70s to the 00s. I have actually seen all 20 movies so : who wins?

    The Hurt Locker vs Kramer vs Kramer
    Slumdog Millionaire vs Deer Hunter
    No Country for Old Men vs. Annie Hall
    The Departed vs Rocky
    Crash vs One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
    Million Dollar Baby vs Godfather Part II
    The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King vs The Sting
    Chicago vs The Godfather
    A Beautiful Mind vs The French Connection
    Gladiator vs Patton.

    My winners :

    The Hurt Locker
    The Deer Hunter
    Annie Hall
    Rocky
    One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
    The Godfather Part II
    Lord of the Rings
    the Godfather
    The French Connection
    Gladiator

    So, I have the 70s winning 7-3.

  • alex

    Ken, if the U.S. allowed dangerous nazi war criminals to work and live in America (Operation Paperclip) I don’t see how guys like Trumbo and Polonsky represented more of a threat. Only the studio bosses and line producers had any real power in Hollywood. Everybody else just took orders. Even if Trumbo wanted to write a pro-commie script it couldn’t get made.

    The red scare in Hollywood was mostly a good excuse to settle old score and play power games. The De Mille – Mankiewicz incident I mentionnned earlier is a good example of that.

  • Alex — I don’t know about Mankeiwicz, but the fact that Trumbo and most or all of the rest of the Hollywood Ten worked against the US fighting Germany UNTIL Hitler broke the Hitler / Stalin pact, and then suddenly reversed their positions per orders from their masters in Moscow, proves they were undeclared agents for a hostile (to say the least) foreign power. So cry me a river that they were denied the opportunity to work in the film industry for a decade or two.

    Let’s cut to the chase; would you, in fact, be this passionate arguing against a studio firing a KKKer today? And if not, why not? Or put another way, are you arguing these guys would have been less evil if they were Nazis? And if so, please justify that statement.

  • alex

    We are not talking about today, we are talking about the post-war era. The US government did not consider the dangerous nazi war criminals from operation paperclip to be a threat and these guys were in positions of power in the Defense Department, the Space Program and the Intelligence services. We can also talk about God knows how many police officers in the South who were members of the KKK. If none of that was considered a problem in that era then spare me the fake outrage over a few commies in Hollywood who had no power whatsoever.

  • Alex — Believe me, my outrage isn’t faked. And hiring ex-Nazis to help us in the Cold War is a far cry from championing people who worked against us in the Cold War. And why would those scientists be considered a ‘threat’? They were basically kept under house arrest for the rest of their lives.

    And what was the alternative? Should we have executed all of them? Or just let the Soviet Union scoop them all up to create weapons to use against us and the democracies of Europe? Seriously, I’m asking. You have the benefit now of 20/20 hindsight. What should we have done with them that would have been better?

    We can also talk about God knows how many police officers in the South who were members of the KKK. What a bizarre non-sequitur. Who isn’t outraged over that now? Is somebody defending this, or turning those people into heroes? (OK, the Democratic Party kept Robert Byrd in the Senate until he died, but even they at least pretended to not liking the KKK much.) Surely we can spare a bit more outrage for people who were lackeys for Joe Stalin. It’s not like it’s an either / or situation.

    Can you at least admit these people were complete and utter scum, so we know we have at least that common ground? Why should we keep romanticizing people who sucked at the tit of America and reaped riches while working to subvert that same country in the name of the most murderous regime is human history? And if you can’t bring yourself to call Trumbo and his ilk scum (although God knows why), how about the Rosenbergs? Alger Hiss? Walter Duranty? Surely there’s some line to be drawn.

  • alex

    I don’t support what the Hollywood blacklisted believed in. I just don’t consider them to have ever been a threat to national security. If the dangerous nazis that went to work for the U.S. government in positions of power were not considered a problem then why should a few commies working at the lower end of the Hollywood food chain be treated differently?

  • I don’t know what you mean by “positions of power”. They weren’t setting policy, they were scientists doing research. They were held under a pretty tight leash, by all reports. And “the blacklist” amounted to people losing their jobs at privately held companies. That’s a completely different issue. No one went to jail for being a communist.

    And you didn’t answer my question; what would you rather have had the US government do with these German scientists? Also, I notice you still can’t just come out and admit the people we’re talking about were vile scumbags. Is it that hard to make some simple declarative statements? Yea or nay. Surely you can just say that Duranty and Hiss and the Rosenbergs were, right? They were actual, active traitors, in an even more direct way that Trumbo and his fellow travelers. You keep dancing around these issues while I’m trying to do you respect of laying out my positions as clearly as possible. It’s hard to have a discussion with someone who keeps moving the goal posts and throwing up and abandoning chaff like the “KKK policemen” issue.

  • P Stroud

    Well, Alex, there was a red scare because the Soviets had acquired nuclear weapons and were threatening civilization and were exporting terrorism into many parts of the world. Yeah, I guess there was some overreaction, as sometimes occurs. However a few movie industry people lost their jobs. The man they liked so much though, Josef Stalin, simply murdered everyone he distrusted. Oh yeah and their families too in many cases. But these facts never get in the way of Hollywood’s never ending obsession with the red scare. Frankly anyone who hates other Americans more than the Soviets (or the Jihadis) simply because of their political beliefs is beneath contempt and, frankly, a fool.

  • I’ve often thought that nothing makes me prouder to be an American than the fact that Joe McCarthy is the greatest figure of evil the US can come up with for the 20th century. Think about that. There couldn’t have been a single village anywhere in the Soviet Union lacking a apparatchik who caused more actual concrete harm to more people than McCarthy did.

    Not saying I’m a fan of the man, as his clownish grandstanding provided the revisionists an all too effective tool with which to smear the largely justified anti-communist movement. However, in the grand scheme of things, you’re talking pretty small beer with Tailgunner Joe.

  • Rock Baker

    I often feel sorry for McCarthy and the ridicule he’s taken (well beyond his passing, making the taste even worse) over a just crusade. I’m not saying he handled himself well, but I support his cause. I’m sure many saw him as a hero during the thick of it.

  • alex

    Well Ken you and I really don’t agree on much outside of movies. I’ll just say one more thing about the Hollywood blacklist. I believe the studios should have handled the matter themselves. They could have met with guys like Trumbo and Polonsky in private meetings and explain to them that the company had an image to maintain and if they wanted more assignments and a future with the company they knew what to do. Studios had the power to blacklist people for all kind of reasons, they did it to Joe E Brown and Edgar G. Ulmer. This is a situation that should have been handled on the inside so to speak. A lot of innocent people could have been spared public humiliation.

    I think that would have taken care of the problem without these clownish public hearings were people were considered guilty until proven innocent and both sides ended up looking bad.

  • Well, the HUAC hearings were not part of the blacklist, but I can see how it’s convenient to lump them together if for some reason one is absolutely committed to not labeling, real, actual American communists as evil, traitorous bastards. Since apparently you just cannot do so, and also refuse to say you won’t (for obvious reasons)–despite my imploring for just a clear yes or no on the matter–I guess we’ll agree this much; anyone who wasn’t a communist, and never covered for or in any way materially aided any real ones like Trumbo, should not have been blacklisted, and in a minor way it’s a matter to be regretted.

    It’s still a matter of some pride, however, that in the century of Mao and Stalin and Hilter and Pol Pot and all the others of their ilk, that this is what we tend to point to when we speak of a (the?) particularly horrific American “overreaction,” and that, after all, in response to a very real and dire threat.

  • P Stroud

    Tailgunner Joe is endlessly depicted as evil because he, correctly, identified some traitors. Some of them lost their jobs. However FDR is considered a saint by the lefties and a champion of the little guy. Apparently unjustly incarcerating an entire race of people, including US citizens, because of wartime hysteria is okay if you are a lefty. Apparently involving the US in a major war for no good reason (WWI/Wilson) is also okay, if you are a lefty. Murdering civilians is okay too (Serbia/Clinton), if you are a lefty. However deposing a dictator and saving American citizens held hostage (Grenada/Reagan) is an act of evil. Leaving troops in Iraq is both evil and good depending on who is in the White House. Keeping prisoners in Guantanamo is also evil or good depending on who is in the White house. Funny how these things work.

  • MatthewF

    Tying up the Nazis hired by America thread to the movies; in the fifties (I think) Hollywood made a biopic of Werner Von Braun (he of the V1 7 V2 rockets) called “I aim for the stars”. In britain this was jokingly subtitiled, “but sometimes I hit london.”

    Irrespective of the Communist discussion, using these guys who had quite happily designed terror weapons and connived in the use of slave labour to build them was indefensible.

  • Matthew — OK, but again, what would have been your preferred solution, then? And I have to say, it’s a bit easier to act all high and mighty about such issues now that the Soviet Union is gone–pretty much entirely because we fought it so fervently. Don’t forget, as recently in the ’80s, lots of people (including Hollywood) assumed we would be the ones to go under first. We can’t exactly assume things would have worked out the same way if we had just stood aside and let the Soviets keep stealing marches on us. It’s bad enough that traitors kept feeding them our technology whenever they could.

    Or, put it another way: Was this morally worse than fighting with Stalin against Hitler (albeit only after Germany broke up the Hitler / Stalin pact)? Churchill famously said he would work with the devil to defeat Hitler, and by allying with Stalin, he did. As he would have himself admitted.

    So after Hitler is defeated, Stalin becomes the number one threat. He is more aggressively contained, however, because the Allies learned a lesson from letting Hitler run around uncontested until way too late in the game. So the question is, why was it OK to work with the devil (Stalin) when in a life and death fight with Hitler, but not OK to work with the devil (ex-Nazi scientists) when in a life and death fight with Stalin?

    I’m not saying you can’t make a defensible argument here, but let’s not pretend it’s a slam dunk.

    I will agree with you that this discussion is entirely aside from the one dealing with Trumbo and the rest; apples and oranges at best.

  • Well a couple days ago Slumdog Millionaire became the 81st Best Picture of the Year Winner as determined by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Yep for 80 times before some movie was anointed at the best movie of that particular year. Whos votes decide the Oscar winner? Well yours! That is if you happen to be a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences! So if you are a professional actor director movie executive or one of the several other categories of film industries workers who qualify for membership thanks for your vote! The rest of us? We have no say. And thats sad.And Im here to tell you those folks at the Academy have a much different standard by which they grade films. They must. We vote with our money but it doesnt count. How else can you explain the critically acclaimed The Dark Knight seen by virtually everyone on the planet not being considered for best picture of 2008? Most critics and an awful lot of the paying public thought The Dark Knight should be at least nominated. In fact for many that nomination was a forgone conclusion. Didnt make it. Some little film nobody except family of the cast and crew saw The Reader was nominated instead. The Reader??? Is that some book your 6 year old uses to learn vocabulary? Im not saying The Reader is not a fine film but the public AND the critics said The Dark Knight was one of the best films of 2008 and it didnt even get nominated by the Academy. Yes I know. Most popular isnt necessarily the best but it should at least be in the hunt. Shoot the movie a great many think is the greatest film ever made Citizen Kane was nominated but failed to win best picture with the Academy.

  • MatthewF

    God, I wish you could use popularity as a bench-mark but imagine how many oscars Michael Bay would have?

  • P Stroud

    The idea that there could actually be a “best movie” is pretty stupid to begin with. So, trying to take it all seriously will only make things worse. ‘True Grit’ was the best western last year. ‘Black Swan’ was the best psychological drama. I’m glad I saw both but could never say one was “better” than the other. ‘Machete’ was the most purely funnest movie of the year. It’s all too subjective to take seriously. I have to kind of feel sorry for people who do take it so seriously.

    And while a movie’s popularity should play as a factor in picking the Oscar, giving too much weight to popularity gives you beautiful looking overly sentimental schlock like Titanic as “best movie”. Please.

    So far this year the best movie is “Drive Angry”.

  • The Rev.

    I really try to avoid the political talk here, but I have to say:

    P Stroud, please please tell me you realize that the kind of things mentioned in your “funny how things work” post (troops in Iraq good or bad, etc.) can just as easily be applied to “your” side of the aisle…

    Anyway, I didn’t watch the Oscars. The lady of the house loves them, so I usually at least absorb them indirectly whilst at the computer or reading, but this year we were gone and they’re on the DVR, so I don’t even have to do that much. I might fast forward to the “In Memoriam” segment, but that’s about it.

  • P Stroud

    Well, Rev, since you ask, I usually apply the H L Mencken maxim of politics:

    “Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right.”

    Since the off-topic discussion was soviet style communism I entirely oppose the political left. I saw firsthand how the commies operated in Nam. I’ll never forget the horrors perpetrated on those people by that murderous system. On other subjects though I’m happy to lay in on the right wingers… invading Iraq and Afghanistan for instance. I never vote party line but try to pick the individual I believe will be the least dishonest. Does that clarify things?