The Oscars

last updated 8 January 2015

And the winner is…bleeding-heart liberalism, said Ned Rice in National Review Online. This year's Academy Awards, conducted last Sunday amid a typical orgy of red-carpet fashion statements and endless self-congratulation, made it abundantly clear why 2006 was such 'œa financial disaster for Hollywood.” The film industry's cultural elites no longer care about entertaining people; for your $9.50, you now get two tedious hours of leftist propaganda. Consider the five films that vied for Best Picture honors. Crash, which won the top award, depicts an America rife with racism. In Good Night, and Good Luck, the Cold War's communist threat is dismissed as mere paranoia. Brokeback Mountain is a celebration of gay cowboys, and Capote, a paean to an effete, gay intellectual. In Munich, Palestinian terrorists are depicted sympathetically. And let's not forget Syriana, nominated for Best Screenplay, said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. A 'œguilt-ridden” piece of liberal angst, this film portrays the CIA as the bad guys who drive a noble Arab prince to become a suicide bomber. 'œOsama bin Laden could not have scripted this film with more conviction.”

There's no denying it, said Richard Schickel in the Los Angeles Times. Never before has a year of Hollywood films 'œbeen so exclusively devoted to liberal dreams and liberal nightmares.' In accepting his Best Supporting Actor award for Syriana, crusading liberal George Clooney defiantly admitted that the industry is 'œout of touch” with red-state America. 'œThat's probably a good thing,” Clooney said. 'œWe were the ones who talked about AIDS…about civil rights.' He concluded that he was 'œproud to be out of touch.' That kind of smugness, though, has a price, said Grady Hendrix in The New York Sun. This year's five Best Picture nominees grossed a paltry $227 million—just one-third of the nominees' gross in previous years. The audience for the Academy Awards is dwindling too: Only 38.8 million viewers watched the Oscars this year, down from 42 million last year, and 55 million in 1998.

Actually, 'œreports of Hollywood's liberalism are greatly exaggerated,' said Adam Cohen in The New York Times. This year, Academy voters may have succumbed to 'œmessage movies,” but Oscar usually shies away from controversy. More often than not, 'œapolitical crowd-pleasers' like Forrest Gump, Titanic, and Shakespeare in Love bring home the gold. Even when Hollywood tackles controversial subjects, said William Booth and Sonya Geis in The Washington Post, it's usually from a safe distance. Schindler's List won the Oscar for Best Picture almost a half-century after the Holocaust. 'œAs powerful as the 1993 AIDS message film Philadelphia may have been,' it wasn't released until the disease had killed 200,000 Americans.