The Oscars 2015.

Last night the 2015 Oscars were awarded in Los Angeles, California, US. I should probably start by pointing out that I'm still trying to find time to watch the 1966 film "The Battle of Algiers." As a result I haven't seen any of this years entries and am unlikely to do so before 2018 at the earliest.

With that disclaimer of out the way though I should point out that this year's Oscars really highlight just how spoiled we were by last year's Oscars. In films like "Gravity, Dallas Buyers Club, 12 Years a Slave, the Wolf of Wall Street" and "American Hustle" in 2014 we were treated to half a dozen excellent films. This year we only really have a handful of very good films and a couple like "Birdman" and "Boyhood" which are considered excellent due to some highly technical aspects of film-making rather then their wider mass appeal.

In part the reason for this is that in the creative industries as with every other human endeavour there is always an element of natural variation. However I think that the main reason is that even before the 2014 Oscars ceremony US President Barack Obama had used his State of the Union speech to fire the starting gun on what was a bruising, year long campaign for the mid-term elections. As a result many studios were discouraged from making any bold artistic statements in case they got dragged into the election campaign. After all as the attack on Sony Pictures demonstrated Obama is not above lashing out against those who criticise him.

As such I should probably start with the big scandal of the year - the alleged racist snubbing of "Selma" a historical biopic that supposedly told the story of Martin Luther King's (MLK) civil rights march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. The important thing that you need to know about Selma is that it is - at best - a slightly above average film rather then a great one.

Although you make certain allowances for artistic license in historical biopics like Selma you expect at least a hint of historical accuracy. This is something that Selma completely fails to deliver. The most irritating inaccuracy because it appears throughout the film is that the MLK character is written entirely in the style of the soaring rhetoric of his famous "I Have A Dream" speech. As a person from living memory it is well established that MLK - nor any other person - spoke like that in private. However from the way he is portrayed in Selma you keep expecting there to be a scene where a waiter asks MLK what he wants for dinner and for him to reply; "I Have a Dream! that tonight a steak and some potatoes will play together on my plate. And they will be judged not by their fat content but how they taste upon my tongue!"

Not only is the MLK character in Selma extremely poorly written the version of the civil rights movement it tells is simply wrong. In the film MLK is portrayed as a black hero triumphing over a white devil in the form of President Lyndon B Johnson (LBJ) who will stop at nothing to deny civil rights to black people and keep them under the jackboot of white oppression. In reality at the time of the Selma march LBJ's government had already passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and had a version of what became the 1965 Voting Rights Act ready to be introduced before Congress.

So although he may not have been able to say so publicly LBJ actually provided MLK with a lot of behind the curtain support knowing that his protests would help get LBJ's legislation through Congress. In fact there is a strong argument that LBJ's alliance with MLK and his confrontational style is what triggered the deep spilt between Republicans and Democrats that persists in US politics to this day. But don't expect that sort of analysis from Selma though.

The scene that really exposes Selma as a complete work of fiction though is the one where LBJ is seen signing an order allowing the FBI to spy on MLK in order to blackmail him into giving up his campaign. The FBI's monitoring and harassment of MLK and most everybody else did happen but it happened a long time before the Selma marches with the order actually being signed by Bobby Kennedy in 1962. Part of LBJ's support for MLK was that he brought the FBI blackmail campaign to an end almost 3 years before the Selma marches.

The way Selma handles the FBI's exposure of MLK as a serial adulterer is probably the film's biggest failure from an artistic perspective. Although he was a great man who achieved a great many things MLK was also a human with human flaws. The most serious of these was that MLK was a man with a huge ego and a serial adulterer who was seemingly incapable of remaining faithful to his wife despite being a Christian minister. However Selma downplays this aspect of MLK's life to the point where he is seen to be exposed for only one affair and this is portrayed almost as a fictional smear story that the FBI had simply made up.

It is often said that great art aspires to challenge you to question the way that you see the world and the people in it in order to change the way you think about life. For example the other much talked about of this years films "American Sniper" has at its heart the great moral contradiction that the hero has killed a lot of people, including children and doesn't seem particularly bothered by it. Unless you're a complete idiot this is quite a challenging idea to get your head around and the film has certainly provoked a lot of discussion particularly amongst lesser filmmakers. So for Selma to attempt to whitewash MLK's character flaws out of history is an artistic travesty that is not the hallmark of an Oscar winner.

Although I think that it should never have expected to win anything it seems that Selma was deliberately snubbed in the nominations in order to send the message that after the Black Lies Matter protests America has more then had enough of fairytales of racism and civil rights. I think the fly in the ointment was the lesser Golden Globes decision to award Best Song to "Glory" from Selma. This forced the Oscar's to also nominate Glory when I think they would have preferred to nominate David Oyelwoyo for Best Actor. That way we could have had lots of discussions along the lines of; "Great pretending. It's just a shame about the writing and the direction."

Glory did end up winning Best Song but I think that was more the Oscars jabbing the Golden Globes in the ribs to remind them of their mistake rather then a compliment.

I really hope that the protest hashtag #OscarsSoWhite was chosen because it is just two letters away from "Oscar's Snow White" - that very famous fairytale. As such it would have served as a warning for people not to be caught up in the racism accusations. After all while Jessica Chastain's meltdown at the Critics Choice awards may have won her friends amongst protesters it did great damage to her reputation as a filmmaker and artist.

I of course prefer to think of Selma in terms of the famous fantasy film "The Wizard of Oz" because whenever I see Eric Holder, Al Sharpton or Barack Obama on TV I find myself thinking; "Heart." "Brain." "Courage."  "Now off to Oz with the lot of you."

At around 12:10 on 23/2/15 (UK date) I'll be back with more when I find out who won what. 

Edited at around 14:30 on 23/2/15 (UK date) to tidy up and add;

With the US film industry backing off this year it opened the door to a large British presence among the nominees. The best of these is probably "The Grand Budapest Hotel." This is technically a very good film with it's set design, wardrobe design and general use of colour really helping to draw the viewer into its lush fantasy world and it did win 4 Oscars in technical aspects such as wardrobe and production design. However with the central story being false allegations of murder of an almost prince-like millionaire amid a world that is slowly being enveloped in fascism it could also be interpreted as a metaphor for either the Islamo-fascism of ISIL or the rise of good old fashioned Nazis in Ukraine although that is really just an operation in support of ISIL.

The UK's big Oscar push though has come in the form of "The Imitation Game" and "The Theory of Everything" which I have heard referred to as "The Terrible Twins." As with Selma both of these films are historical biopics of recent, inspiring (but British) men - one of whom is still very much alive.

The Imitation Game tells the story of Alan Turing a mathematician who played a lead role in the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War Two by breaking their famous Enigma code. This is a very obvious reference to the coded discussions that surround the Oscars where even some of the films themselves are coded references to something else. Although it is disputable Britain likes to claim that Turing invented the first computer so his story very much portrays Britain as world leaders in science, technology and innovation.

The title of the film is the name given to what is also referred to as "Turing Test" after the man who invented it. Essentially this is a set of rules that determine at which point an artificial intelligence machine can be considered capable of imitating a human. With huge advances on artificial intelligence in things like Siri, Twitter-bots and computer generated actors recently this topic is becoming something of a global issue particularly within the world of film-making.

The Imitation Game also tells the story of Turing's life after the war where he was exposed as a homosexual which was still considered a criminal offence in the UK in the 1950's and 1960's. Sentenced to chemical castration to control his "unnatural urges" Turing committed a very Snow White style suicide by biting into an apple laced with arsenic. To this day there is a persistent urban legend that Apple Computers logo of an apple with a single bite taken from it is a tribute to Turing. However that has been frequently denied by both of Apple's founders and their marketing department with the words; "We wish we'd thought of that."

Although I don't think it is particularly useful to talk about it in those terms nowadays homosexuality is considered more as a congenital disability then a choice. This was a big theme of the 2014 Winter Olympics which with a big focus on Jared Leto and songs from the Wizard of Oz the 2014 Oscars appeared to criticise as a missed opportunity to tackle homophobia within Russia. It also leads neatly into the second part of the UK's big Oscars push -The Theory of Everything.

This tells the story of Stephan Hawking a world renowned British astro-physicist. Hawking really coined the term "The Theory of Everything" to refer to a unified quantum field theory that would explain all life in the universe. This is a topic so complicated I think of the World's 7 billion people there's only really around 100,000 who properly understand it. I often refer to my great rambling posts like this one that bring together a range of diverse topics in an effort to explain their interaction with each other as; "Grand Theories of Everything."

While famous in his own right Hawking has probably been brought to a wider audience by the frequent references to him and appearances in the physics themed US sitcom "The Big Bang Theory." Although it has since grown into something much grander the first couple of series of this were very sharp attacks on elements of my personality. For example to this day Rihanna seems unable to decide whether I'm a Sheldon Cooper or a Leonard Hofstadter. This TV show was referenced a lot during the 2012 Summer para-Olympic opening ceremony that was narrated by Stephen Hawking.

Hawking of course also famously suffers from Motor Neuron Disease (MND) - ALS to Americans. This was such a hot topic in the summer of 2014 that thousands of people were forced to dump buckets of ice water over themselves in an effort to cool down. 

For the achievement of playing a man as he moves from almost his school days to early old age while developing a literally crippling physical disability Eddie Redmayne was widely tipped to win the Best Actor award for his portrayal. However I thought voters may have been turned off by the fact that much like Amanda Seyfried's character in "Jennifer's Body" this big effort by the UK was more then a little needy.

While I think the producers of Selma could have learnt a lesson from last year's "The Long Walk to Freedom" the campaign for The Imitation Game saw a rare mistake from legendary Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Although officially banned the Oscars sees lobbying for votes on such an epic scale it would put even the most venal politicians to shame. Weinstein is considered the master of this by being able to take some fairly average films like "The Kings Speech" to big Oscar wins.

This year Weinstein's campaign for The Imitation Campaign involved formally lobbying the British government to grant official pardons to all the men of Turing's generation who had been convicted of being homosexual. This struck me as very clever but in a year where this type of deceptive civil rights campaign were being distinctly frowned upon it seems to have been a rare miscalculation. The film's star Benedict Cumberbatch did go some way to redeeming himself by mischievously making some racially insensitive comments while discussing Selma.

Away from the Selma debacle probably the most talked about film of this year has been Clint Eastwood's "American Sniper." Here I have to declare an interest because due to my ability to suddenly pop up with devastating effect in far away warzones I have been compared to a sniper on numerous occasions. Also having recently watched "Gran Torino" with my somewhat racist father I am in danger of developing an absolutely humongous ego.

My enigmatic vanity aside though American Sniper is a film that certainly has a lot to say for itself. The central moral contradiction of the hero being a mass killer acts as a device for a wider discussion about war as a concept. War is undoubtedly chaotic, dirty and extremely violent.

Therefore it would be so much better if we could all live in a world where were we respected each others differences and solved our disputes through negotiation and compromise. The problem is that if just one person decides that they don't want to live like that and instead wants to use violence to impose their will on everybody else. When that happens there becomes no choice other then to use overwhelming violence against them in order to protect the wider peace.

This issue is particularly relevant this year with the rise of ISIL. Coming from a background of Ivy League universities and polite middle-class dinner parties US President Obama has time and time again proved himself incapable of grasping this universal truth. As a result ISIL are continuing to grow while Obama tries to challenge them with talking shops on job creation when they really do just need shooting in the f*cking face. We try to sound enthusisatic when we say it because it's really not at all funny.

The issue of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) also features heavily within American Sniper. Again this is a timely issue with the growing number of US veterans returning damaged from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in particular the recent Veterans Affairs (VA) scandal which saw many of them dumped on the scrap heap while Obama rushes to find jobs for jihadis.

One of the main complaints about American Sniper from people who seemed to see it as their duty to condemn it was that the central character Chris Kyle isn't shown to be particularly affected by PTSD. However for people that are familiar with PTSD and the issues surrounding it that actually triggers a much wider discussion;

The first issue is that PTSD can have a very delayed onset. A guy I used to work with was caught up in an IRA bombing of a barracks in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Despite seeing many of his friends blown to pieces he was fine for about 10 years. Then long after he'd left the army the nightmares and panic attacks suddenly started.

The other big issue is that the military very much has a culture that you achieve no matter what the adversity. Although it is essential in a warzone this culture of "suck it up and get on" can discourage veterans from seeking help for PTSD because there is so much pressure on them to pretend that everything is fine and they can cope. Therefore perhaps there needs to be a cultural shift within the military so PTSD is considered as just another element of combat fitness so if you're away from the battle you need to get it sorted in much the same way you would a broken leg or a nasty axe wound.

Another possible explanation of why Kyle wasn't particularly affected by PTSD is his role as a sniper. Although they operate within warzones almost by definition if the enemy know where a sniper is then the sniper isn't really do his job properly. As a result they tend to experience fewer moments where someone is literally trying to kill them which I think is one of the main driving factors behind PTSD. However despite being somewhat removed from the pumping adrenaline and mind numbing terror of close up combat snipers are brought very close to their targets through optical sights and in order to hit those targets they actually have to be very calm when they shoot.

As a result it seems to me that extremely likely that for each one of his 160 kills Kyle has very carefully considered the situation before calmly deciding that there is no other option then to take that persons life. As a result it is probably much easier for him to be at peace with what he's done then if he'd been blasting away with a machine gun or an area weapon like a mortar.

It is also likely that the portrayal of PTSD within American Sniper was downplayed out of respect because during filming Kyle was shot and killed by another veteran who he was trying to help cope with PTSD. Obviously that case is now the subject to an ongoing trial within the US but from what I've read in the media it does sound as though the accused was suffering from paranoid psychosis in reaction to PTSD at time of the shooting. As a result I think that he is certainly able to argue a defence of insanity and even if he is unsuccessful in passing what is a very high legal bar I'm sure the Judge will be prepared to be sensitive in sentencing.

I therefore think that American Sniper should have won best film. However I appreciate that with very vocal Democrats attacking them for giving a reality check to Selma Oscar voters would be hesitant to also celebrate a film that has been embraced by Republicans for fear of diluting the message on Selma. Also the trend this year has been very much towards the arty niche rather then the mass appeal of American Sniper.

In itself that promotes a discussion of the merits of high art versus mass appeal. For example I think the issues in American Sniper were raised in a much more artistic manner in the 2008 film "Waltz With Bashir." However I also know that despite it having a 7 year headstart that film has only been seen by a fraction of the people who have already seen American Sniper. As a result this is the first time that many of the people who only saw American Sniper will be having these discussions.

  
At 14:50 on 23/2/15 (UK date) of course there's going to be a sequel.