Conservatives blast Oscar best picture nominees as ‘Idiotic’
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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