David Oyelowo plays Martin Luther King in Selma, one of four biopics nominated for best picture at this year’s Oscars.<137>Photo credit: Atsushi Nishijima<137><137><252><137>
There are about three weeks until the Oscars on Feb. 22, and as usual, people are playing the reality game. Can't we admit the Oscars are all a kind of fiction? The best film, the best actress, the prettiest dress – giving superlatives to things that aren't really measurable. Sophisticated people roll their eyes at the hyper-inflation of this months-long movie contest, but many also tune in: After the Super Bowl, it's the most popular show on television.
The Oscars turns publicity campaigns into one long convoluted story that runs almost from September through February. Only in this story, anyone with a podium or a podcast gets to add a sentence or two. A decade ago, the talk was all about dirty-tricks Oscar campaigns: Were Rubin Carter in The Hurricane or John Nash in A Beautiful Mind really good guys?
There are numerous reasons each Oscar season seems to produce ever-greater effluences of ideological hot air. The nominations always include more biographical films: This year has four of the eight nominated for best film: American Sniper, Selma, The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game. Anyone with access to Wikipedia can find the points where history and fiction deviate, and use it to score points. In the increasingly polarized American political and media landscape, questions about the authenticity of Oscar movies are just another opportunity to get shrill.
Take the recent embellishment by Sarah Palin (please?) who has a few ill-chosen words to say on her Facebook page about American Sniper, Clint Eastwood's film, loosely based on the life of the late sniper, Chris Kyle:
"Hollywood leftists: while caressing shiny plastic trophies you exchange among one another while spitting on the graves of freedom fighters who allow you to do what you do, just realize the rest of America knows you're not fit to shine Chris Kyle's combat boots. May the epic American Sniper bring nothing but blessings to Taya [Kyle's widow] and the children of this true American hero."
A few small quibbles: The trophies are actually gold-plated britannium. Also, American Sniper has been nominated for six Academy Awards, which means lamestream Hollywood really likes the movie, although they may be seeing the film from a different vantage. "Just saw American Sniper," tweeted arch Hollywood leftie Jane Fonda. "Powerful. Another view of Coming Home. Bradley Cooper sensational. Bravo Clint Eastwood."
Yes, Michael Moore tweeted about how he was always taught "Snipers were cowards." Like Palin, Moore seems to have bought into the idea that American Sniper celebrated blind patriotism.
More absurd was the fuss about Seth Rogen's tweet that American Sniper "kind of" reminded him of parts of the Nazi film within Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which, if you check out Nation's Pride on YouTube, proves amusingly true. Rogen apologized and insisted he hadn't intended the comment as a political statement: Canadians sometimes aren't familiar with explosive materials.
The reaction of the media pundits – from Fox-TV's right-wing commentator Sean Hannity to the theoretically liberal Whoopi Goldberg on The View – echoed the Palin line: Folks such as Rogen and Moore should remember that soldiers died in Iraq to defend their freedom of speech, which is another bizarre fiction.
There's a distinct difference between the English and the American reactions toward the use of dramatic licence. The Theory of Everything, for example, leaves some things out: The story of physicist Stephen Hawking and his wife, Jane, is a romanticized love story that handily skips a 10-year period when the couple were estranged. The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing and the machine that broke the Enigma code, includes numerous scenes that are completely fictional: Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) did not enter Bletchley Park by solving a crossword puzzle; Turing did not call the machine that broke the Enigma code after a dead school-friend, Christopher; there was no Russian spy working in his group; and no detective looking into his missing service record. The British media have noted all these dramatic liberties, but don't seem to overly care. It's theatre, darling.
The controversial films, of course, are American. American Sniper deviates from history in a couple of significant ways. Kyle's scenes in Iraq are largely ficitonalized: Neither the characters of the Butcher nor the sniper, Mustafa, had much to do with Kyle's four tours of duty. What's grabbed the critics though, is what the film leaves out, the improbable boasts that Kyle made when he came back home: That he killed two carjackers in Texas and was let go by the police; that he was hired to shoot looters at the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina and that he had a bar fight with Jesse Ventura (who won a $1.8-million [U.S.] defamation lawsuit against Kyle's estate). It seems fairly obvious why Eastwood and scriptwriter Jason Hall left those crackpot stories out, though in a negative review in L.A. Weekly, critic Amy Nicholson asked: "Why call his character Kyle at all?"
Let's say his name was Martin Luther King and he was a hero of the left, not the right. Would some fictional shortcuts matter as much? In truth, everyone likes the movie Selma (even Glenn Beck) but the criticisms about accuracy may have hurt its Oscar chances (it has two nominations, for best picture and best song). The problems are levelled about the portrayal of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who is shown, not as a wholehearted supporter of King's fight for black voting rights, but as a foot-dragging politician who had the FBI monitor and threaten the civil rights leader. Director Ava DuVernay has emphasized that she's a dramatic storyteller, not a historian, which is an astute response.
Part of the magic of movies is how they play peekaboo with reality, smoothing out history and staging imaginary worlds. Not every element can work for every audience. Science buffs are going to wonder why The Theory of Everything has characters in a Cambridge seminar discussing black holes before the term was coined. Someone else is going to notice that the anachronistic italicized Pepsi sign from the future in 1965 Selma.
Noticing these things is part of the fun of the game. The cheating part is when you argue for or against the value of a movie solely on its propaganda value.