AMERICA ILL AT EASE

Hollywood in trouble

The Oscar nominations reveal an America that's ill at ease with itself and its place in the world, says Andrew Gumbel

Published: 03 March 2006

The 5,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the ones responsible for picking the winners in this Sunday's Oscars, are hardly representative of life. They are, for the most part, well-heeled and residing in Beverly Hills.
It's become something of an annual sport to deride them for being too conservative or simply too enamoured of spectacle for spectacle's sake to recognise the more understated, more subversive sides of cinematic endeavour. And yet, the Academy's choices often end up saying a surprising amount about the times we live in. Take, for example, the year 2001, which turned out to be a geopolitical turning point. There were a lot of remarkable movies that year, among them Traffic, Steven Soderbergh's take on the drugs trade, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee's breathtakingly poetic martial-arts epic.
Both of those films were nominated for Best Picture, but were shunned in favour of Gladiator. Cinematically speaking, the choice might have been dubious, but in other ways it now looks oddly prescient. A fat and happy America had just allowed George Bush to become President under less than transparent circumstances, presaging a new era of global fear and paranoia; here, meanwhile, was a film about a tyrant who lays wrongful claim to the Roman Empire and keeps the people so gorged on bread and circuses that they barely notice his infamy.
Chicago, in 2003, was clearly the Academy's bid for musical escapism in the midst of the invasion of Iraq, while The Lord of the Rings, which hit it big with its third instalment in 2004, was an epic expressing all of America's high-minded ideals - the noble motives and heroic actions in a battle between good and evil - that the ugly realities of the Iraq conflict were in the process of destroying.
This year's crop of Oscar movies is perhaps richer still in determining the flow of political and social currents in the United States. America once again finds itself at a crossroads. The Bush administration is at its lowest ebb in popularity, and the country is still groping its way towards a decision on what it yearns for next. The world seems a lot more frightening than it did five years ago, while America as a country appears appalled by how polarised it has become, socially and politically.
Some critics have looked at the success of films such as Brokeback Mountain, Capote and Transamerica and declared this to be the year of homosexuality in Hollywood. Others have bracketed Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck together and suggested that what we are seeing is, rather, a flowering of hard-hitting movies with overtly political themes. I don't think either of those categorisations is quite right, because inherent in both is the assumption that a liberal agenda is being promoted to an unsuspecting conservative heartland. I think these films are symptoms of a much broader American malaise.
A film like Brokeback Mountain doesn't break any new ground in terms of depicting homosexuality in an Oscar-nominated picture. That job was performed 13 years ago by Philadelphia. What makes Brokeback Mountain seem new is the context; its protagonists are not big-city lawyers but rather farm hands in the rural West, the sort of people brought up to believe that the very notion of homosexuality is abhorrent. And that, in turn, has made the film seem like some sort of beacon of hope for rational discourse in a country woefully short on it. Who can say, as Republicans are inclined to, that homosexuality is an abomination when the characters in Brokeback Mountain are so obviously human? The film opens at least the possibility of civilised conversation on this question.
The thinking on this year's overtly political films is, likewise, perhaps a touch over-simplistic. Political films come and go regularly - think, for example, of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. What is striking about this year's Oscar nominees is the way they betoken a sudden lack of confidence in politics, and in political and public discourse. Good Night, and Good Luck is a film that encourages audiences to question what they learn about the world from a corrupted and complacent media; it is set in the McCarthy era, but it is also obviously about the state of journalistic bravery in today's world too. Steven Spielberg's Munich may ostensibly be about a crisis of conscience that besets a Mossad hit squad, but clearly it is also, more allegorically, about the corrosion of America's moral standing as it lashes out in retaliation for September 11.
This theme of uncertainty and questioning oozes out of another nominated film this year, Crash, which takes a scalpel to the happy-go-lucky surface of modern Los Angeles and finds it gravely infected with hostility and racism.
The America that emerges from these films is far from a happy place. It is one that is not only losing faith in its place in the world, but is also losing faith in its ability to comprehend the nature of its own decline, its own capacity for intolerance, bigotry and violence, and the betrayal of its own high-minded principles.