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Real Answers™
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Copyright: © 2010 Tom Flannery
680 words

OSCARS TAKE RIGHT TURN

By: Tom Flannery

Hooray for Hollywood!

They actually held an Oscar ceremony last week in which there wasn’t a single word of left-wing lunacy uttered throughout the entire evening.  And some of Hollywood’s looniest libs — Alec Baldwin, Barbra Streisand, Sean Penn — were completely subdued in their appearances.

Well, poor Mr. Penn did look like someone had punched him in the gut when he had to announce that the winner of the Best Actress category was Sandra Bullock for her role as a devoutly Christian, politically conservative Republican, card-carrying member of the NRA in the surprise blockbuster “The Blind Side.”  But at least, for once, Penn showed some taste in not shooting his mouth off.

This is the same Sean Penn, after all, who just last week demanded prison sentences for journalists who dare tell the truth about his good pal Hugo Chavez, the communist thug, by referring to him as a dictator.  Oh, and the same Sean Penn who, when asked recently about his critics, said how much he’d like to see them die screaming of rectal cancer.

What a guy.

Then there were the awards themselves.  Without question, the favorite to win the Oscar for Best Picture was “Avatar,” if only because it pioneered a breakthrough in both filmmaking and the moviegoing experience itself.  Most prognosticators also thought James Cameron would take home the Best Director statue for that film, since it was his vision that made it all happen.

Not only was “Avatar” hailed as a cinematic wonder, but that technological artistry propelled it past Cameron’s previous film, “Titanic,” in box-office receipts to make it the highest-grossing film in Hollywood’s history.  In years past, “Avatar” and Cameron would have been shoe-ins.

But there was one big problem with “Avatar” — the overall message of the movie, which bashes the U.S. military while promoting pantheism, twisted feminist theology and radical environmentalism.  Not surprisingly, critics and audiences responded far less favorably to the story than the technology.

Ross Douthat described the film in the New York Times as a “long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into communion with the natural world.”  This stands in stark contrast to biblical truth, which tells us that there is only “one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus” (I Timothy 2:5), and that we are to worship Him alone.

Then there was the anti-American angle of “Avatar.”  Conservative film critic John Nolte called it “a thinly-veiled, heavy-handed and simplistic sci-fi fantasy/allegory critical of America from our founding straight through to the Iraq War.”  

Now, here’s where things get interesting.  For the past few years, Hollywood has made a slew of anti-war films bashing the U.S. military, most of them dealing with Iraq (“Rendition,” “Lions for Lambs,” “In the Valley of Elah,” etc.).  Despite the fact that every one of these films has bombed at the box-office, Hollywood continues cranking them out.  Say what you will about the Hollywood Left, they’re committed to their causes (you know, trashing our military heroes, attacking the Christian faith, killing unborn babies, sexualizing children, all the usual leftist fare).

Yet not only did “Avatar” fail to win the Best Picture award, but it lost to Katherine Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” — a pro-military film in that it shows our soldiers to be committed to carrying out a very dangerous mission, while also dealing with the perils of war in a realistic manner.

In another Oscar surprise, Bigelow won the award for Best Director.  Best of all, she and the film’s screenwriter dedicated three of the statues picked up by the movie to our troops.  So it looks like Hollywood is beginning to get the message.

Coming on the heels of Hollywood making the first great Iraq-related movie, HBO’s wonderful “Taking Chance” — for which Kevin Bacon won a well-deserved Golden Globe — last week’s ceremony marked a move in the right direction.

Maybe there’s hope for Hollywood after all.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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