The Upcoming Academy Awards: Selma, American Sniper and Other Issues

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The upcoming Academy Awards: Selma,

American Sniper and other issues
By David Walsh
21 February 2015
The 87th Academy Awards ceremony will take place
Sunday evening, hosted by actor Neil Patrick Harris, at the
Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California. If recent
ceremonies are anything to go by, the event will be
thoroughly scripted and lacking in spontaneity. Occurring at
a time of unprecedented global tension and volatility,
virtually no hint of the external world will be permitted
entry into the self-absorbed proceedings.
As much as the Academy Awards broadcast becomes
more embalmed with each passing year, it still passes for a
major public occasion in the US. In fact, its generally stilted
and meticulously stage-managed character places the awards
show in the same category as every other event on the
official calendar.
For good reason, the audience for the tedious three-hour
plus broadcast has generally shrunk in recent years. The
2014 show attracted some 44 million viewers, one of the
highest totals of the new century, but was still considerably
down from the 57.25 million in 1998.
The awards show remains big business, both in terms of
box office revenue eventually generated for the films that
win major honors and advertising money for television
network ABC, which broadcasts the ceremony. The price of
a 30-second commercial this year is $1.95 million, and the
network anticipates netting some $100 million.
The American film industry as a whole remains big
business ($31 billion in revenue in 2013), despite declining
ticket sales. According to the tracking firm Rentrak, North
American movie ticket revenue was down more than five
percent in 2014, to an estimated $10.35 billion (about 30
percent of the global total), the third such year-over-year
decline in the past five years.
The declines in frequent film attendance among 18to-24-year-olds (17 percent) and 25- to 39-year-olds (also 17
percent) were especially marked. According to one industry
analyst, the film industry is losing that younger audience
because theyre agnostic about how they get their content.
The generally poor quality of the films coming out is also no
doubt a factor at a time of widespread economic hardship.
The entertainment and media market in the US is

estimated to be worth between $550 and $600 billion
dollars, the largest in the world and a third of the global
total. The export of US entertainment services, including
film, television, music, sports, gaming, Internet, etc., is
calculated to be worth half a trillion dollars worldwide.
Too much is at stake on Sunday evening, in other words,
to let genuine considerations of artistic excellence ultimately
hold sway.
As for the nominations themselves, a host of arbitrary,
subjective and political factors no doubt plays a role. This
is Hollywood, after all.
The eight nominees for best picture, for example, vary
widely in quality. The crassest elements in the film industry
and media are protesting, as they have done in response to
the Academy Award nominations a number of times in the
past several years, that the highest-costing and
largest-grossing films are underrepresented in this
category. In fact, none of the seven top-grossing films
received a best picture nomination. The budgets of the
highest-grossing films averaged $151 million, while the
budgets of the nominated films averaged $21 million (low
by contemporary Hollywood standards).
Boyhood, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Selma, despite
their limitations, are worthwhile nominations. Whiplash,
Birdman, The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything
contain intriguing moments and performances. Clint
Eastwoods American Sniper is a terrible film, which
mythologizes the Iraq war and one American hero, sniper
Chris Kyle. Mr. Turner, which did receive three other
nominations, and Foxcatcher, with five, certainly deserved
to be nominated for best film.
Complaints have been raised about the failure of Ava
DuVernay and David Oyelowo to receive nominations for
best director and best actor, respectively, for their
contributions to Selma, the film about the 1965 voting rights
march. Certainly, the inclusion of Bradley Cooper, who does
little more than drawl and draw a bead on outgunned Iraqis
in Eastwoods film, at the expense of Oyelowo, is a
travesty.
The failure of any black performers or directors to gain
nominations this year has stirred the charlatan Al Sharpton
and his National Action Network into action. In a statement,
the group, which plans a protest outside the award ceremony
Sunday, called on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences to accelerate [its] push to be more inclusive. With
all of this years acting contenders being white and no
women in the directing or writing categories. Its obvious
that the Academy has a diversity problem they are going to
have to fix. Sharptons outfit exists to pressure large
corporate entities to employ a greater share of the African
American upper middle class that it speaks for.
The question of American Sniper is a more vexing one.
Why has the film found a popular response?
There are no doubt numerous factors. For one thing,
Eastwoods film had the good fortune to appear in movie
theaters when there was virtually no competition. A number
of the big-budget films that came out simultaneously were
ignominious flops. Moreover, in its action sequences,
American Sniper contains a certain tension and drama, and
the film claims to depict a war the concrete facts and details
of which few Americans know muchand are no doubt
curiousabout.
Eastwoods own personality and career are somewhat
complex issues. The actor-director, deservedly or not, has
the reputation of being vaguely antiestablishment. His
body of work as a director is generally poor, often
abysmally poor, but it does contain a few genuine and
humane bright spots, including True Crime (1999) and
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). His love of jazz and jazz
musicians is also well known, reflected in his directing Bird
(1988), a fictional tribute to legendary saxophonist Charlie
Parker, and producing the documentary Thelonious Monk:
Straight, No Chaser (1989).
As we have noted, American Sniper s script downplays
the filthy right-wing and anti-Muslim bigotry to be found in
Kyles autobiography. Unlike the actual sniper, who
apparently reveled in the killing of Iraqis, Coopers
character looks sorrowful after each murderous episode and
even tells a fellow soldier on one occasion to shut his mouth
when he begins to celebrate.
Nonetheless, the claim that American Sniper is any sense
antiwar or has merit because, in the words of producer
Harvey Weinstein, it introduces America to PTSD
[post-traumatic stress disorder], is preposterous.
As we noted in a comment January 31 on the WSWS:
The sequences set in Iraq present the American forces as
engaged in a righteous campaign against an almost
inconceivably savage and evil foe. American Sniper s
attitude toward Iraqis, and Arabs generally, is hostile and
contemptuous. The US forces represent order, modernity,

civilization
and
sanity;
the
Iraqissuperstition,
backwardness, treachery and violence. The American
soldiers are obliged, according to the logic of the film, to
exterminate great numbers of Iraqis both in self-defense and
as some sort of act of public hygiene.
The success of American Sniper is nonetheless troubling,
and indicates some of the cultural and political problems in
America, where the population has been bombarded with
foul notions on a daily basis for the past several decades.
The promotion of militarism has been especially poisonous.
The American people are led to believe at every opportunity
that the professionalized armed forces, with whom they have
little to do on a daily basis, are made up of heroes
protecting them from unspeakable evil. Skepticism and
mistrust no doubt abound, but the relentless propaganda has
its impact, including in weakening the instinctive empathy
for the suffering of others.
The population is unaware to a large extent, thanks to the
campaign of lies of the government and the media, of the
atrocities being committed by the American military on a
daily basis, and it is largely unprepared for the sinister role
this mercenary force is readying to play in every part of the
globe and in the US itself.
Whats being celebrated in American Sniper, after all, is
especially despicable. Snipers have more often than not been
portrayed in American films as cowards or worse. In films
like The Manchurian Candidate (1962), The Day of the
Jackal (1973), Two-Minute Warning (1976) and numerous
others, the killer-sniper is presented as the lowest form of
human life. And America has had its experience with
real-life snipers, from the assassination of John F. Kennedy
in 1963, the University of Texas tower shootings in 1966
and beyond.
Whether American Sniper wins the best picture award or
not depends to a large extent on how intimidated and cowed
Hollywood liberalism is by the ultra-right and its spurious
claim that wide layers of the population are enamored of the
American military and the semi-fascist Kyle. By any logical
artistic or intellectual standard, Eastwoods film should not
have a chance, but one shouldnt hold ones breath.
To contact the WSWS and the

Socialist Equality Party visit:
http://www.wsws.org

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The upcoming Academy Awards: Selma,

The entertainment and media market in the US is

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contemptuous. The US forces represent order, modernity,

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To contact the WSWS and the

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