PEOPLE WHO LOVE MUSIC HATE medleys. And people who love movies hate those “Celebrate the Movies” clip reels shown on cable TV to promote movie channels, and in theaters to promote moviegoing. As one of the diehards who sat up to watch the 77th Academy Awards, I really hated the opening clip reel, put there by the movie industry to remind me how much I love movies. Even the most willing cow needs an occasional rest from the milking machine.
If the members of the Academy had wanted to attract more viewers, then perhaps they should not have been so timid about including the two most controversial films of 2004, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The Passion, which received three nominations but did not win (Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, Best Makeup), deserved one for Best Picture and Best Director. And Fahrenheit, which received no nominations, deserved one for Best Documentary, a category in which fairness and accuracy have never been among the criteria.
Without remasticating the well-masticated debates over these films, I will simply note that both sold a lot of tickets to people who do not ordinarily go to the movies. So if they had not been airbrushed out of the proceedings, then perhaps all those one-time ticket buyers would have tuned in, boosting the ratings and saving us from that tacky clip reel.
It was, of course, entirely appropriate that the clip reel rolled across the ceiling of the Kodak Theater before and after each commercial break. For this is what movies are rapidly becoming: commercials for themselves. Instead of drama, comedy, suspense, or any other recognizable genre, the standard-issue Hollywood flick is now a pastiche of attention-grabbing moments meant to thrill, tickle, tease, and titillate audiences too immature or distracted to care how, or whether, they all fit together.
A perfect example is Diary of a Mad Black Woman, last weekend’s top box office hit. Jerking loonily from soap opera to Christian uplift, gutter cruelty to gross-out comedy, it is the first feature directed by Darren Warren, a veteran director of music videos. And like music videos, it only reinforces the mini-attention span of the average popcorn buyer. It remains to be seen whether Diary will survive to a second weekend. Some of these messes do, some don’t. The industry is now structured so that one weekend of suckers is usually enough.
Which returns us to the Oscars. If Diary is typical of what works in Hollywood these days, then Chris Rock was the perfect MC. His opening monologue was painfully convoluted, making sense only as an attempt to offend the right people (notably President Bush) without offending the wrong people (notably the millions who voted for Bush but might also shell out nine bucks to see a Chris Rock movie).
Rock was coherent in the worst way: He could not drop the race shtick, but he could not make it funny, either. At one point he ran a man-on-the-street segment, asking African-American moviegoers if they’d seen Sideways. In case you were wondering, they hadn’t. The message will sound familiar to anyone over age five: Hollywood is for white folks; black folks have their own culture; so don’t expect black folks to care about stars like . . . uh, Morgan Freeman (Best Supporting Actor), Don Cheadle (nominated for Best Actor), or Jamie Foxx (winner for Best Actor), or movies like . . . uh, Ray and Hotel Rwanda.
Earth to Chris: It’s not about race this year. African Americans have starred in good movies and bad. This is worth taking notice of, but most moviegoers, regardless of color, are preoccupied with other topics, such as war and peace, life and death.
About war and peace, little was said at the Oscars, apart from Rock’s stunningly lame joke about a “war” between the Gap and Banana Republic over nonexistent “toxic tank tops,” which he followed, bizarrely, with a message of “love to the troops fighting for freedom all over the world.” (To his credit, Academy president Frank Pierson offered a corrective in the form of a proper tribute to the armed forces.)
About life and death, there was (and is) more to be said. Four of the five top Oscars went to Million Dollar Baby: Best Picture, Best Director (Clint Eastwood), Best Actress (Hilary Swank), and Best Supporting Actor (Morgan Freeman). And the Oscar for Best Foreign Film went to The Sea Inside, a Spanish film that–in the opinion of just about everybody–is similar to Million Dollar Baby in offering a sympathetic depiction of assisted suicide.
Both The Sea Inside and Million Dollar Baby have been roundly attacked by religious conservatives and activists for the disabled. Both movies have been stoutly defended by secular liberals and “death with dignity” activists. Curiously, no one has bothered to judge them on a combination of moral and aesthetic grounds. To do that is to attack one and defend the other.
The Sea Inside (Mar adentro) is about a real man, Ramón Sampedro, who became famous for suing the legal authorities in his native Spain for the right to die. Paralyzed from the neck down by a diving accident, Sampedro (played by Javier Bardem) spent 30 years bedridden before losing his legal battle but winning his war. After publishing his memoirs, he got one of his devoted helpers to give him a glass of water spiked with cyanide.
The Sea Inside is beautifully produced, directed, acted, and filmed–even the music is beautiful. It is also morally tendentious in the extreme. Rather than dramatize the real debate in Spain, it shows the handsome, sexy Sampedro effortlessly humiliating Padre Francisco, a quadriplegic priest who seeks to dissuade him. Father Francisco is made to look narrowly dogmatic, and the Church is made to look inconsistent: opposing suicide, euthanasia, and abortion while supporting the death penalty.
One need not be a Catholic to grant that the Church’s position on these questions is not only consistent but also philosophically compelling. And that is exactly how the Church is portrayed in Million Dollar Baby, a film that deserves better than to be lumped together with The Sea Inside.
Million Dollar Baby is about Frankie, a burnt-out boxing coach (Eastwood) who reluctantly agrees to train Maggie, a feisty young female boxer (Swank). Frankie is the kind of doubting Catholic who attends mass every day in order to debate the priest, the thoughtful young Father Horvak (Bryan O’Byrne). When Maggie is rendered quadriplegic by a dirty punch, she begs Frankie to disconnect her life support. Frankie consults Father Horvak, who tells him, very sympathetically, not to do it. And Frankie obeys–until Maggie starts biting her own tongue in a desperate attempt to drown in her own blood. At that point, he relents.
But this is not an advertisement for assisted suicide. On the contrary, Frankie acts in full awareness that he is committing a mortal sin. But out of pity and love, he is willing to risk his own soul for that of another. And afterward, he disappears. No one, not even his old friend Scrap (Freeman), knows where he has gone. And the audience is left with a simple question: Will God forgive him?
We can look at the Academy Awards the way the two children in the urban folktale look at the room full of pony manure. Either we can turn away, disgusted by all that you-know-what, or we can start digging, inspired by the idea that there must be a pony in there somewhere. The latter approach is worth keeping, even when faced with an Academy Awards show as dispiriting as this one, because there is still good work in there somewhere. Of course, if The Aviator had won Best Picture, I would have laid down my shovel.
Martha Bayles, who teaches in the Honors Program at Boston College, posts a blog called Serious Popcorn at www.artsjournal.com.
