3.01.2007

Hollywood curiously silent on goblin menace

Over at Town Hall, Clifford May, only a week late, is mad at the Oscars, just as if they had some relevance. Here's why:

How curious that at the Academy Awards ceremony last weekend not a word was said about the terrorist movements dedicated to the destruction of the West.


Indeed! Even though there were no nominated films about terrorism, we know that every waking hour should be spent condemning jihadis, so the failure of anyone at a Hollywood awards show to get up on stage and say "I have only bad things to say about terrorist movements dedicated to the destruction of the West!" is indeed an inexplicable lapse.

Hollywood stars and moguls don’t appear to fully grasp that such groups as al-Qaeda and such regimes as that ruling Iran not only hate Republicans, evangelicals and Richard Perle. They also hope to suppress artistic freedom, impose second-class status on women, and stone to death those with unconventional sexual orientations.



Surely, if they were aware of this fact, they would not be so quick to make public statements about how they wish America was a theocratic dictatorship patterened after Iran, like those made by...uh...well, someone, I'm sure. Probably George Clooney.

Movies are made to entertain and turn a profit, but they can shape public opinion as well. Some film-makers aim to advance an ideology. Think what Sergei Eisenstein did for Soviet communism, or what Leni Riefenstahl did for the Nazis.


Yeah, boy! Stalinism and Nazism would never even have gotten off the ground if it wasn't for those two!

(Michael Moore is not in their league, though he may aspire to be.)


Also, he is fat.

May goes on to make the hilarious claim that The Battle of Algiers was an objectively pro-terrorist movie that served as a founding document for the IRA (who presumably possessed a time machine so they could screen a copy for their founders in 1919), and concludes that since the Oscars didn't give any face time to frothing nutjobs screeching about how we'll soon all be beheaded by moon-worshipers, Hollywood obviously must care about global warming more than terrorism. I'm guessing that since a movie about Irish mobsters in Boston won an Oscar and a movie about the Revolutionary War didn't, Hollywood also cares more about organized crime than it does freedom from tyranny. Q.E. fuckin' D.!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

And you just know if there is a film about terrorism that wins an Oscar, he'd be among the first to chide Hollywood for treating terrorism and the political issues around it like a morally complex topic (just see the wingnut response to "Munich") rather than just making a "24"-esque, ultraviolent action film with swarthy Arabic villains and the plot depth of a Saturday morning cartoon.

Anonymous said...

the right is always saying hollywood amounts to squat in the arena of public opinion ("celebrities have zero credibility and should stfu"), and yet has expectations of what they should speak about in the 15 seconds they have to thank the academy and acknowledge peers and family members.

Matthew Rossi said...

Is he saying we need a new Triumph of the Will?