John Podhoretz
The Oscar nominations are in, and the message is clear: Make a movie in which Americans act heroically against Islamic enemies of the United States, and you lose.
Even if your film is careful not to wave the flag and offers a deeply ambiguous portrait of US foreign policy, you get the thumbs-down.
There are two astonishing omissions from the nominees for best director — astonishing because the movies they directed were nominated for Best Picture, and because each film is universally considered a directorial tour de force.
The first is Kathryn Bigelow. As the only woman director ever to win an Academy Award (for “The Hurt Locker” three years ago), she was a shoo-in for “Zero Dark Thirty” — until yesterday morning, when her name was missing from the list of nominees.
Dan Steinberg/Invision/AP
Bigleow: “Zero Dark Thirty” director not nominated because film wasn’t sufficiently anti-waterboarding.
The second is Ben Affleck, whose third film as director, “Argo,” was reviewed favorably by 96 percent of the critics tallied by the Web site Rotten Tomatoes — making it the best-reviewed of Oscar’s nine Best Picture nominees.
Nonetheless, it was the screenwriters who got recognized by Oscar voters and not Bigelow and Affleck, who come closer to being the authors of these movies than most directors do.
Note that both Affleck and Bigelow received Directors Guild of America nominations, and split directing prizes offered by the National Board of Review.
Something deliberate was going on here. What?
Bigelow’s sin in the eyes of Oscar voters is more obvious.
“Zero Dark Thirty” has come under criticism because it features scenes in which an American interrogator uses so-called “harsh techniques” like waterboarding against an al Qaeda operative. The operative isn’t punished for his actions, nor are those actions questioned by his colleagues — so journalists who have spent a decade attacking the War on Terror for its cruel depradations have expressed disgust at Bigelow’s handling of what they view as torture.
Naomi Wolf, fresh from writing a book about her vagina, compared Bigelow to the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.
And The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer likened Bigelow to an apologist for slavery: “In her hands, the hunt for bin Laden is essentially a police procedural, devoid of moral context. If she were making a film about slavery in antebellum America, it seems, the story would focus on whether the cotton crops were successful.”
It’s absurd to claim that “Zero Dark Thirty” fails to portray these techniques uncritically. Throughout the film, they cast a pall over the selfless conduct of Americans trying to hunt down Osama bin Laden. But Bigelow doesn’t draw a moral equivalence between the US efforts and the mass slaughter of 9/11, and that is what has offended her critics — and surely contributed to the denial of her nomination.
Don’t take my word for it; take the word of the entertainment journalist Tom Junod of Esquire, not known as a conservative. “Bigelow snub is political punishment,” he tweeted yesterday, calling it the “academy’s way of holding its nose while embracing ‘Zero Dark,’ and so of having it both ways.”
And Affleck? His film about the Iranian hostage crisis of 1978-1979 begins with a prologue blaming successive US governments for the political conditions inside Iran that led to the anti-American depradations of the Ayatollah’s handmaidens.
But the rest of the film centers on the amazingly clever and all-true efforts by CIA agent Tony Mendez to sneak into Iran and transfer six hidden US diplomats out of the Canadian embassy before the Iranians figure out they’re there.
Affleck may not have been specifically targeted for disrespect, the way Bigelow was, but it’s impossible not to take note of his rejection by the Academy in light of the commonality in subject matter — America vs. Islamism in the greater Middle East — shared by “Argo” and “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Nor can one ignore the fact that their heroes — and they are heroes, without question — work for the evil, hated, monstrous CIA, the organization that has served up more villainy in more terrible movies than any other over the past 40 years.
So, yesterday’s lesson for ambitious filmmakers is:
If you know what’s good for you, attack the CIA, don’t praise it or seek to understand it. And don’t show the United States triumphing over Islamists.
— Sincerely, the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences
Jpodhoretz@gmail.com
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Oscar’s sad snubs
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