Conservatives blast Oscar best picture nominees as 'Idiotic'

New York Post film critic Kyle Smith and I agree on a lot of things about the Oscars, notably that "Inglorious Basterds" was a terrific film and that "An Education" scribe Nick Hornby should be writing lots more movies. But Smith is a conservative and as his brethren in Washington have proved again and again that conservatives see the world through a very rigid ideological lens. Even when it comes to movies. So if you thought it was nutty for conservatives to claim that Barack Obama is a socialist, even when his administration is loaded with rich guys from Goldman Sachs, you can imagine what they thought of yesterday's Oscar nominations.

Smith just put up a post titled the "Five Most Idiotic Oscar Nominations of the Year," where he trashes a number of wonderful movies, starting with "The Hurt Locker." Smith knocks the Kathryn Bigelow-directed film for having only one great scene, "which is essentially repeated three times, just to be sure we caught it," before dismissing it entirely for having only one simple theme: "We get it. War is a drug. Four words do not a story constitute, let alone a great story, let alone a great movie."

He also dismisses "District 9" for clearly having a squishy liberal message: "Ooh, the aliens are kinda like black people in Jo-Burg shantytowns. Deep, man."

And he really loathes "The Messenger," since it clearly doesn't possess any conservative-friendly gung-ho war cliches, writing off the film's best screenplay nomination by saying: "A humvee of anti-military cliches. Truly one of the worst 'serious' pictures of the year."  

John Nolte, Big Hollywood's resident right-wing bomb-thrower, also got in a couple of shots at the nominees (although he loves "Crazy Heart," so he clearly can't be all bad). He also trashed "The Hurt Locker," which in conservative circles is seen as an anti-Army film, even though it portrays American soldiers as complex and professional, not to mention incredibly brave guys. In the course of making his Oscar predictions, Nolte picked Bigelow as the best director winner, even though, as he put it: "I was no fan of the film for a number of reasons, including its trashing of our military and a rudderless story that eventually devolved into a series of fairly repetitive set-pieces." 

All I can say is that its lucky John Wayne isn't alive anymore, since surely if today's conservatives had seen "The Alamo," they would've called it a "Hate America" movie, since we end up losing the battle to an army of barbaric Mexicans. That's not the kind of history we should celebrate, right?

Photo: "District 9" Photo credit: TriStar Pictures

Comments

[Robert]

Hey, genius. You can be a Socialist AND a rich person. These folks are the personification of the book Animal Farm, in that they are wealth and go by the creed "All are equal, but some are more equal than others". Guess which group they think they belong to? Obama and his cronies believe that the laws they pass only apply to the general public, not to themselves (witness the original health care proposal which Congress refused to require of themselves). Obama IS a Socialist. Only a blind idealogue could think otherwise.

[Joseph L Cooke]

Had the director of the Hurt Locker been a male, the movie would not have been nominated for anything, except for the DVD most likely to be featured in WalMart's $5 bin.

[James]

According to your definition, Robert, George W. Bush was the biggest socialist of the last 10 years. Only a blind ideologue could think otherwise.

[carlbauer4]

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[Jonathan Byram]

Why does the writer think the two guys he mentions represent the whole nebulous category of conservatives? There are all types of people out there with nuanced ideologies, and that fact makes this article a weak, generalization that only really applies to the two guys he quotes. Do conservatives draw a party line on movies?

[Jonathan Byram]

Good critique of those two people's opinions though.

[Anonymous]

I think this film critic is confusing "The Hurt Locker" with "Avatar". "Avatar" is the film with the anti-military, anti-American themes. "The Hurt Locker" merely examines the lives of soldiers under duress. If anything it is sympathetic to the soldiers' plight, and the difficulty of the choices they must make in a bloody and asymetric war.

[Chris]

Patrick, I love your column, and strongly disagree with Kyle Smith and John Nolte, but to think that conservatives have the market cornered at looking at the world through a very rigid ideological lens, is to be disingenuous and more than a bit naive.

[Debbie]

How strange? The Post, a paper owned by Fox which financed "Avatar" is trashing all of the Oscar competition. Shouldn't a conservative be against the anti-corporate message in "Avatar" or do you give that a pass if it makes the parent company 2 billion dollars?

[Al]

A conservative doesn't like films that are against his values? Thats disgusting....Seriously though, its not like he didn't like the films because of their messages, he just more or less found most of them to be sloppy (except for the Messenger, he clearly didn't like that for political reasons) Im conservative and I had no problem with Hurt Locker, and it sounds like he didn't have a problem politically, just that he didn't like the film. As for D9 it seems he just didn't like how obvious the analogy was, something liberal friends of mine have complained about.

These "conservatives dont get movies" articles across the web get pretty old. Im sure there are grumpy old conservatives angry by some of the movies in here , but your evidence in Smith's case doesn't really add up. Its insulting, please stop.