20 Weeks To Oscar: Ragin’

Last night, I wrote a piece that dismantled with factual details the contention that Selma‘s failure to get more than two Oscar nominations was an important cultural event. I sat down and wrote it, but I didn’t want to come out with it on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. My intention was not to be disrespectful of the film or the man.

Maybe I will run the piece. Maybe not. Mostly, I am just exhausted with all the rage.

I don’t know that I have seen anything like this before. It’s kind of about Oscar season. It’s mostly not. But Oscar has yelled, “pull” and now everyone is shooting at the clay pigeons. And the bullets are flying from every direction.

You couldn’t really set up a more intense juxtaposition than “Selma vs American Sniper.” It’s a ridiculous and false narrative. But it’s out there. You can feel it.

On Selma, there is a significant contingent of women and people of color that see the film as a kind of film industry savior in the midst of a white patriarchy. The Academy composition plays right into the hands of this… never mind that most of the “old white guys” of The Academy are liberal and were supportive, if not actually active in the civil rights movement.

The median age of The Academy membership, 63, puts the median voter at 14 years old when the Selma marches too place. They probably watched on their black-and-white TV. Older members made movies in the decade after Selma with heavy civil right subtexts. Feel free to insult them, after all, they are white men, and they all are too well-positioned in our society to give a shit. Or so goes the mantra of some.

The average age of The Academy doesn’t change too dramatically over time because the organization is a gathering of veterans, and you just don’t have a ton of people who qualify in their 30s. I looked back to 2012, when The Academy started their internal campaign to make the organization younger and less white in the last two years of new member invitees. I looked at the age of actors being invited, mostly because their ages were readily available. The average age was 46.92. The youngest was 29-year-old Jonah Hill. The oldest was 68-year-old Ken Howard (who was also SAG President, likely pushing him in). 8 of the 25 invitees are of color. 11 of the 25 are women. Five of the 25 were under 40 at the time, all but one of those a prior Oscar nominee.

For the sake of discussion, last year’s class of acting invitees was only 20 deep, only five are women (only two former nominees), and only three of color. So even while The Academy has been pushing the gender and race agenda, progress can be hard to come by… because The Academy is an institution of elitism. That is the nature of the beast. The elite of the film industry, male and female and all the colors that are in the group. There is no bar to entry, except for what the group itself sees as exceptionalism.

There are many who feel this Academy thing should end… that the limitations of the film industry over the last 100 years, in terms of open access to people of color and women, makes the organization impossibly suspect. And while I don’t think that shutting the Academy doors is necessary, I am not offended by that position. It is forthright and honest.

What I find somewhat intolerable is the chant of “fix The Academy.” It is not broken. It does what it was built to do. As the numbers change in the film industry, the numbers in The Academy will change. Roughly 3% turnover each year.

Another occasional argument is to kick out members after they have not worked in their chosen field for some period. I can’t really address this argument with a straight face. Ageism is brutal in Hollywood and once you are in the club, you should be allowed to stay in the club. Moreover, the anger at older members is driven by a sense that they are in the way of more “progressive” choices of films to honor. Don’t trip on the giant pile of “Oscar only nominates indie movies” stories on the way out to selling that take.

Maybe I am just an old guy. I bowed out of active participation in the Broadcast Film Critics when the group decided that anyone with a blog who claimed to have a certain number of readers could join the group. This while critics at newspapers and TV stations across the country were being laid off, left and right, a newly-endangered species. If the number of paid critics is contracting and the number of “Broadcast Film Critics” is expanding, I did not (and do not) understand what the principle behind the group actually is. I’m funny that way.

I understand the principle behind The Academy. I won’t fight to the death to maintain it. If the public wants it to go away, it will. But I know that if you tinker with it too much, too quickly, inorganically, it will not have the same principle or meaning as a result.

And I offer this challenge. Make a list of the 50 female directors or 500 actresses who are not in The Academy who you think deserve entry. And then we can start a discussion about The Academy. What I see as needed is more roles for women that would bring prestige to more actresses and more films of every size directed by women so that you could fill that list of 50 without making it 5 directors who have made a studio movie and 45 from Sundance.

The same is true for people of color. We need more to be seriously in the studio game to get more balance in The Academy. I, for one, would have no objection to, say, successful black movie comedians getting in, like Ice Cube or Kevin Hart. Getting Snoop Dogg in may be more of a challenge. I assume Tyler Perry is already in… one of his cinematographers is. But if not, welcome. Tyler Perry may not be critically acclaimed, but he is commercially legit and deserves a place, as a white guy with his kind of career would have. (Adam Sandler?) But still, not enough bodies to make a real impact. We need a longer list of serious films and filmmakers of color in the industry before they can impact The Academy. (For the record, Middle of Nowhere grossed under $250k and Ava DuVernay got into the Director’s Branch. An effort is being made.)

Now on to the other side of the war zone. American Sniper.

A huge hit. The film revolves around a soldier who has an eye-popping 160 military-recorded kills. In the third act, he succumbs to PTSD and recovers in the same act. Is it an examination of the price paid for soldiers who do what they do under orders (orders which are never discussed in a political context) or is it military propaganda, promoting the idea that killing Iraqis was (and perhaps, is) okay and does not demand any further consideration by the American public?

The violence against black Americans in Selma triggers images of modern-day Ferguson and other police killings of blacks. But there is never any question in the film about which side is right. American Sniper doubles down, tweaking both sides of the current discussion about law enforcement in America, attached to the discussions about America’s military overseas, especially in the middle east.

Are we just doing our job or are we overreaching? Overreaching by going into into Iraq… overreaching by opening fire on an unarmed man who threatens you… overreaching by being okay – even enthusiastic – about killing people of a different color in a different country… overreaching by turning police departments into small army units… etc. Or again, is all of this or some of this what is necessary to live in peace and comfort?

This is where the fight is… these very important issues. But not unlike the argument over Selma, which has somehow become viciously pinpoint-focused on The Academy, those attempting to have those discussions in public are being shouted down by whatever side they aren’t on. And the rhetoric is horrible, including vile language and death threats.

Making it worse, American Sniper got six Oscar nominations to Selma‘s two, although amazingly, neither Best Picture-nominee got a nod for Best Director. But aside from the awards issue, the Selma support, which is often quite comfortable calling out white men as the source of all the pain, is a perfect juxtaposition with the very white male support of American Sniper, although any assumption that Sniper is overwhelmingly supported by men and not women would seem belied by the box office.

In other words, the pro-American Sniper crowd is the crowd waiting for the Selma marchers to dare to come across the bridge, defending what they see as theirs and willing to be violent to do it.

But there is a problem with this silly conceit. There are a bunch of liberals who like American Sniper and don’t see it as a kiss-up to the problematic military interventions in the Middle East.

But it gets worse. The primary factual pushback against Selma‘s portrayal of President Johnson? You guessed it… more liberals.

So not only do you have liberals and conservatives/military fighting against one another, but you have a massive internal battle between liberals and liberals… on both movies.

This is the kind of turf battle that I would turn to Walter Hill to direct. Get out the pick-axes and sledgehammers!

Many of those who are enraged by Selma‘s so-called snub have taken to positioning those questioning its factual question marks around LBJ as self-serving angry old white men who can’t live with allowing Dr. King the credit that is due him if it isn’t filtered through a white savior. But these men were some of those who worked with LBJ in pushing through the Civil Rights Acts and ultimately, the Voting Rights Act. These are, mostly, live long left wingers who served their country in the name all that their current attackers hold dear. Joe Califano, who worked for both the Johnson and Carter administrations, showed the poor taste to offer an opinion that Selma should be disqualified from box office success or awards for the alleged LBJ slight. Those were fighting words.

But it got tougher to argue that Selma is dead-on accurate with the chiming in of the iconic, gentlemanly Bill Moyers, who noted the errors, but still supports the film (what I consider the correct position) and New York Times op-ed firestarter Maureen Dowd, who wrote about both being a fan of the film and being offended by the rewriting of history.

Dowd pissed off a lot of liberals. Some serious people even accused her of showing racist stripes because she talks about seeing the movie in a theater filled with black teens who were on their phones. She, along with Moyers, were getting in the way of the backlash backlash.

After a brief run (a few hours) of trying to defend the changes by claiming that they were only being pointed out because Ava DuVernay is a woman and a woman of color at that, the popular positioning shifted to, “that’s not the point… the movie offers something else… LBJ is a minor character.” I don’t really disagree with this, but with all the facts being confirmed by source after source, it was still quite rare to hear an acknowledgement that history had, indeed, been changed somewhat.

About 24 hours after Dowd’s missive comes David Carr’s column, which is not positioned as a response, but might have been. I imagine Carr was onto this issue on his own steam and that the timing was coincidental. In any case, Carr went pretty wild on the arguments against The Academy’s old men, the old men of LBJ, and Selma’s primary nomination for Best Picture being an important problem worth lingering on.

Both writers claim a love of the film. Both writers claim to be unhappy about the lack of more nominations for the film. But they separate at LBJ.

Dowd 1-liner: “There was no need for DuVernay to diminish L.B.J., given that the Civil Rights Movement would not have advanced without him. Vietnam is enough of a pox on his legacy.”

Carr 1-liner: “This is not a movie that endangers L.B.J.’s legacy, it cements King’s at a near perfect moment in history and should be celebrated as such.”

Feels like the makings of a food fight. Yet I don’t see these arguments as completely contradictory. Carr dismisses the LBJ complaints, even if true, in the name of art and a greater good. Down embraces the LBJ complaints as an issue because she feels the power of the art will distort history and diminish the good done by Selma.

My point is not to adjudicate the disagreement here, but to point out that the liberal bastion of The New York Times can’t make up its mind either, taking very harsh positions that both mesh and conflict.

I should also note that Carr’s closing paragraph is as close to my best view on all this as anything I have read:

While the snubs may sting and point toward a broader blindness, it’s still more important in the long run that a young female black director received the backing of a Hollywood studio and made an important film. Long after the last blubbering actor has been played off the stage while thanking his or her makeup assistant at the Oscars, we will still have “Selma.”

I wish I knew where that guy was when his darker side was wallowing in the nasty, wildly-misguided psuedo-allegations that were highlighted repeatedly in the rest of the column.

Also on the left, there are fans of American Sniper and haters and every flavor in the middle. Aside from the abusive insane comments, e-mails, tweets etc, that are coming the way of most every writer that is either not a fan of the film or calling out Chris Kyle on the ugly rhetoric in his book, there is also a dismissal of pretty much every pro-Sniper writer as being either an angry white male or lacking the ability to consider Eastwood critically or being a right winger or worse, and anti-Muslim bigot.

I guess my point is, ultimately, that being a moderate on any of these angles on any of these two movies may be the most dangerous place of all. The positions people are taking, in seemingly every direction, are so extreme that not taking a position is seen as an attack. Or suggesting that there are factual problems with anyone else’s claims. Or, well… here’s a tweet sent in my direction this morning:

Benefiting from all the high drama is Boyhood, now even more likely to win Best Picture. Though the real threats to the film’s win seem to be Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel, voters will probably be too fatigued with all this fighting to even consider any argument requesting a change in the status quo. Perhaps gentle, loving Boyhood is the only opportunity left in this crazy Oscar season to all just get along.

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