Oscar gloom
Mark Steyn
GCod bless Michael Moore! The corpulent provocateur didn't deserve to win the Best Documentary Oscar — Bowling For Columbine is (to put it at its mildest) grossly misleading on everything from the pertinence of its title to Canadian supermarket ammunition sales, and the Academy voters who chose to salute Moore's showboating over that inoffensive film about the birds are the ones who should really be mocked. But I would gladly give the bloated bloviator the award for Best Acceptance Speech. Moore noted that his Oscar was for 'nonfiction' (which should have made Bowling For Columbine ineligible) but that we lived in 'fictitious times' in which we had 'fictitious elections' and a 'fictitious President'
At this point, the boos began. Not from the stars, but from the fellows in the cheap seats, way up in the balcony. The Rows One to Ten celebs looked as inscrutable as if they were auditioning for a Fu Manchu remake, except for Harrison Ford, who had a condescending grin, like a mediaeval duke amused by a row between the cockfighters. Moore ploughed on through the jeers and got to his big finish, a message to the fictitious President: 'Any time you've got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up!'
Actually, it's the Dixie Chicks whose time seems to be up. Since one of the gals attacked Bush in London the other week, the Texan cuties have been haemorrhaging fans. Country-music devotees are not antiwar, but they are anti anti-war celebs who lose touch with their base: 'Sticks Nix Dix Chicks' is the word, as Texas radio stations stage public bulldozings of the ladies' CDs and disc-jockeys dismiss them as the Blixie Chicks and the Vichy Chicks. Most of the A-listers in the Oscar audience agree with Michael Moore on the 'fictitious' President and his 'fictitious' enemies, But because Hollywood has no desire to go the way of the Dixie Chicks they devoted a lot of thought to how best to obscure that awkward point of disagreement with their adoring public. No red carpet, no dance numbers, and a general substitution among the men of black tie with black tie — i.e., no bow ties, with their unfortunate associations of glitter and frivolity, but just long black neckties designed to signal that our actors have tremendous gravitas but instead giving them the air of rented pall bearers.
Even when there was nothing ostensibly depressing about the subject under discussion, they felt obligated to be slumped in gloom. Last month, Dustin Hoffman was at the Berlin Film Festival and told his audience: 'This war is about what most wars are about — hegemony, money, power and oil.' This month, he was at the Oscars to introduce a montage of movie highlights from the last 75 years, but his morose demeanour and lips tighter than Catherine Z-J's dress signalled that, whatever the formal dictionary definitions of his pre-scripted boilerplate, his speech was really about hegemony, money, power and oil, if only the boobs out in Viewerland were subtle enough to pick up on the subtext.
If Dustin wants to turn a 75th anniversary celebration into a funeral, that's up to him. His fellow stars delegated the question. Ben Affleck announced that the decision on whether or not he would wear an anti-war lapel pin would be left to his stylist. One can't help feeling more stars would have been better off deferring to their stylists rather than what passes for their consciences. The dress-down Oscars impacted especially hard on the ladies, few of whom looked their best. Nicole Kidman's pulled-back hair was way too severe even for the Major-ArtistWrestling-With-Global-Geopolitics look: if we can't even have hot babes on Oscar night, then the terrorists have won.
Meanwhile, unable to mention the war, Oscar's scripters settled for code-speak. In the Sunday Telegraph a couple of weeks back, I wrote that the Screen Actors Guild was now
fretting that anti-war celebrities will fall victim to a neo-McCarthyite blacklist. This Rives Holltwood the perfect excuse to quit talking about Saddam and move on to their favourite subject: themselves — and, more specifically, the bravely of the embattled artist in a repressive society that demands absolute conformity. You can almost write the intro: 'Art is the conscience of society, and never more so than when the freedoms we take for granted come under attack' (Susan Sarandon to present).
It wasn't my intention that the specialmaterial writers should take me literally, but Ms Sarandon and Barbra Streisand all but stole my lines. Barbra noted the importance of freedom of speech, 'even for artists', she added in an ill-advised attempt at wryness, 'We create because we desire to share ourselves,' said Susan Sarandon, a tad defensively.
But on Sunday that's just what they weren't doing. 'If Frida were alive today,' said the actor Gael Garcia Bernal of the subject of Salma Hayek's monobrowed biopic. 'she would be on our side — against war.' Well, of course she would. Frida Kahlo was a painter and a committed Stalinist. But, as an uncloseted commie, she'd he pretty unimpressed with the
career-covering wishy-washiness of Hollywood consciences. The code-speak made the glitterati sound not just solemn and self-regarding, but also monumentally dull.
In its way, the Dixie Chicks and the Oscars usefully clarified the humbug. For half a century, the pop business has been corporate continuity masquerading as permanent revolution. Movie radicalism is even more bogus. When Steve Martin came on stage after the booing and told the crowd he'd just been backstage where the Teamsters (a union with famously persuasive methods) were helping Michael Moore into the trunk of his limo, he got a huge laugh. But you couldn't help feeling the line had been pre-scripted to take advantage of Moore's predictable stupidity to make Hollywood look good. Hey, if you can't be pro-war you can at least be antiMoore. The fat guy wound up not just Saddam's useful idiot, but Hollywood's, too.
Oh, well. The music industry's going down the toilet. Who says the movie business won't follow? Watching Ethel Merman belting out `There's No Business Like Show Business' on the 75-year highlights reel, you couldn't help noticing that, since the Oscars stopped being show business, they've done no business, This year, they drew the smallest TV audience ever. Why did they think it would be otherwise? Did they honestly believe Dustin and Barbra being portentous is what pulls the crowds? And what's with the funeral garb? Most Americans think we're winning this war. If they're in mourning for anything, it's for an entertainment industry that can't even make itself entertaining.
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