Academy, anything but academic

This is just stupid. I can grumblingly admit that maybe A History of Violence isn’t the sort of thing the Academy wants to deal with—it eschews the sort of swaggering hipster violence-as-irony, a la Pulp Fiction, that the members seem to like in favor of something far more disturbing and convicting—an interweaving of horror and action film thrills with an effrontery moral wrath that doesn’t let the viewer entirely off the hook for enjoying it. Really, if Scott Foundas and the Slate movie clubbers have to remind each other that it’s supposed to be funny, it’s probably too tonally complex for the rigidly staid tastes of the Academy.

But come on—no Squid and the Whale? This is one of the best reviewed films of the year, and also one of the most original. It’s got luxury, angst, familial breakdown, sharp jabs at upper middle class intelligentsia, sexual dysfunction, and showy performances that don’t just wrench the heart—they rip it apart with the entire tool kit.

But no, the Academy members, instead, are too pathetically timid to nominate anything that might question their own urban bourgeoisie sensibilities or their cash cow bearing bloodlust. So instead we get a cornucopia of easy liberal tirades: a heartfelt, overly sincere cry for more good old fashioned liberal journalism, a dimwitted bit of exploitative race baiting, a bone thrown to a favored son to prove he still matters and a movie whose sole basis for popularity is that it’s about gay cowboys. The only film that really deserves to be in the Best Picture category is Capote, and even that film, I suspect, is there more for its percieved homosexual sympathy than its enigmatic brilliance. Why not just rent everyone in the Academy a limo filled with flowers and send them off to a pompous ceremony devoted solely to obscene, ostentatious public self-congratulation. Oh wait…