An Inconvenient Academy:

Al Gore and the Oscars. Like Sleeping With Your Cousin.


My contempt for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (or AMPAS) is well documented. The Academy is not some group of respectable creative types. The Academy is not some counsel of elders any smarter than you or me. 'The Academy' is just Hollywood. The Oscars are Hollywood congratulating itself in a multimillion dollar promotional presentation for producing half a dozen films out of several hundred that don't resemble the same dog-hair encrusted fecal matter that the rest of their films do.

Good work guys. Get back to me when your track record is any better than 1/400.

Earl Torgeson, genuine AMPAS voter.

See, most of the time, Hollywood's content to produce films that are merely astonishingly stupid, putting their audience on the level approximately of a trained ape chewing on a milk carton. When Oscar season rolls around, they dust off their idea caps and produce films that are not merely stupid, but also philosophically sloppy, profoundly immoral, or usually both. These are often the ones that go on to win major awards. So what could be a more perfect marriage of cultural-political stupidity than for Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth' to be nominated? Folks, this one exploded my irony meter and nobody even seems to realize it's funny.

I work in the television business. Let me be clear here. The entertainment biz is full of morons. Not sprinkled here and there, but a full-blown infestation, in high and low places alike. Talent and intellect are not king. People survive not just through talent (though it happens) but through manipulation, through backstabbing, and through the sheer force of their personalities. Right or wrong.

Most of hollywood is stupid.

Most of hollywood is also incredibly naive.

Virtually all of Hollywood is incredibly leftist.

Of course, Hollywood is the perfect breeding ground for liberals. Where else does one find such a perfect storm of shrill, insecure self-absorbed neurotics, the deification of emotion, religious dedication to the unreal, and unvarnished contempt for the intelligence of the common man? The conditions are flawless. Hollywood is the ideal ideo-social petri dish of liberalism.

And they're basically all children as this nomination shows. Alas, in a more sophisticated and skeptical age, we might have viewed films made by government officials with a modicum of skepticism. We're wary to trust them on the news, but we prostrate ourselves before them when they're given unchecked access to a budget of millions and a professional editor, and are professing to explain things that the general public has absolutely no means of understanding, verifying, or criticising.

So let's give him the most prestigious award in the industry.

In a more enlightened age, we'd unhesitatingly call such a production 'propaganda', whether it was correct in its assertions or not. Our children will look back on this era the way we look back on June and Ward Cleaver. With a head-shake and laugh, and hopefully a feeling of vastly greater sophistication over that bafflingly naive blip in the history of the west.

"Pop, were people really that gullible back then?"

"Yes, Junior, they were."

"But those were politicians saying the world was gonna end unless you gave em all that money and power to control stuff! Like that crazy guy on TV on sunday mornings that begs for money!"
"Right."

"Golly, folks were dumb back then!"

"Yep."

Then we'll be forced to explain that these were the same people that needed widescreen, multimillion dollar documentary presentations to educate them in such matters of subtlety like 'fox news is conservative' and 'fast food is bad for you'. Forget June and Ward and the postwar 'Aw, shucks Mister!' generation. This is the golden age of naive.


-Nick

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