I don't often go to the trouble of filling out the ballot you find in a magazine or the paper for your vote for the Oscars, because most of the time I haven't seen enough of the movies to do more than take a guess. But this year, I'd seen a number of them and read the reviews on almost all of the nominated movies and people, so I did. In the event, I averaged 2 out of 3 correct, and correctly called all of the major awards and the ones like Best Song, Best Animated Feature and Best Score that I really care about. But that's not what this post is about.
Two categories I did not get right were Best Documentary Feature and Best Documentary Short.
My picks were for the former, Food, Inc., a movie about the substandard foods and crap that are in the American food stream; and for the latter, The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant, about the closing of a GM plant that built pickups and its impact on the community in which the plant was located. The winner for Best Documentary Feature was The Cove, a movie about dolphins trapped and hunted in a cove in Japan; and for Best Documentary Short, Music by Prudence, a movie about musicians in Zimbabwe.
What do these Oscars tell us about the Hollywood types who voted for them and got them the awards? That the denizens of Hollywood give more of a damn about saving animals and being politically correct than they do about acknowledging the very real problems that exist in the United States with a food supply we cannot completely trust and manufacturing jobs that are disappearing with nothing to take their place. Or to put it bluntly, they give more of a damn for foreigners than they do about their fellow Americans.
I don't suppose this should surprise me that much. The hypocrisy of Hollywood actors, producers and money men as a group has been discussed here before, most often in connection with actors and actresses who have made piles of money off movies in which they use firearms but offscreen are firmly in the left-wing, anti-gun camp. But given the current parlous state of our nation, one would think the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences might have spared some thought for their fellow citizens who are suffering, the way both Kathryn Bigelow of The Hurt Locker and Sandra Bullock of The Blind Side did; for the soldiers fighting overseas and for foster and adoptive parents respectively.
I guess that sort of compassion absent a natural disaster is too much to hope for from the motion picture industry.
