[I don't know whether WSWS reviewer David Walsh meets the criteria for curmudgeon or does accents, but I think there is much to his take on the Incredible Shrinking Oscars. Excerpt:]
78th Academy Awards: why such a poor showing?
By David Walsh 8 March 2006
In its own peculiar fashion, the Academy Awards ceremony is a political event. It reveals as much, sometimes more, about the state of America than it does about the condition of the cinematic arts. The most recent edition, the 78th, on Sunday night, was largely a sad and painful affair.
Nearly everyone involved made a pretty poor showing. Hollywood’s elite, by and large, revealed its most insular and self-involved features. The choice of Crash, by a healthy margin the weakest of the films nominated for best picture, provided an unfortunately appropriate climax to the evening. How is it possible that a gathering of quite talented people, many no doubt with firm opinions about the world and their art, could be so limp and lifeless?
Almost nothing of the current turbulence in the US or the rest of the world seemed present in the ceremony. Not one of the words “Bush,” “war,” or “Iraq” were uttered. But not only that, the drama of everyday life, which one would expect to make its presence felt in a ceremony honoring individuals engaged in one of the most social of arts, was largely absent as well. The event, like so many in the US these days, had an unreal air. The numerous presenters and recipients came and went from the stage, more or less interchangeably, and hardly an image sticks in the memory. ...
When considering the current difficulties, there is a limited value in blasting away at the liberal and left elements in the film industry for their evident inadequacies. These inadequacies are not the product of malice or even social indifference. They are bound up with our present situation, as well as a certain inheritance from the traumas of the twentieth century.
There is mass dissatisfaction in the US, but it has yet to find coherent political expression. On the surface, and this impression is bolstered by the mass media with all the power at its command, political life appears to be continuing in the same narrow channels of the two-party system as before. Signs of organized opposition and resistance are still relatively few and far between. A certain gloominess pervades sensitive and humane circles. Some will conclude that the population has accepted the administration, the war and all the rest, and throw up their hands. Other left elements may not go so far, but work in quiet desperation, not confident of encountering support.
And there is an entire layer in the film industry, which came to prominence during the last radical wave of the 1960s and 1970s, who no doubt feel that they have been abandoned and don’t quite know what to do, individuals with genuine talent, like Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep and director Robert Altman—all rather forlornly in attendance Sunday night at the awards ceremony, none of them with much to say at present.
The ignominious collapse of the labor movement and the apparent ability of the corporations to slash jobs and wages at will, without yet provoking resistance, are real factors in the confusion and skepticism in Hollywood. The social movement of masses of people against the foundations of the profit system is an indispensable precondition for a major shift in the mood in artistic and intellectual circles. There is no point in demanding of people more than they can provide. An eruption of struggles will shatter existing relationships and conceptions, and fling the door wide open. New forces and new voices will emerge. The crisis of capitalism is too deep; the social ailments cannot be swept under the rug.
And a new mass audience will emerge. Genuine and deep popularity, along with controversy and a further polarization, will come with audacity, telling the truth, and indicting the powers that be.
Those elements in the film industry who see no alternative to the Democrats, and accept the same essential social and ideological framework as their right-wing critics, are always on the defensive, disarmed, and impotent. In fact, no film art in our time will flourish except as a conscious rejection of the profit system, its defenders in both major parties, and the values of its ‘entertainment industry.’ The emergence of a serious left-wing in American cinema, and a far higher aesthetic quality in filmmaking, depends a great deal on the growth in influence of socialism and Marxism among film artists.
<http://wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/osca-m08.shtml>
Carl