Oscar season can make for good moviegoing fun. Rush out to see all the nominees before the big show! Debate their merits and defend your favorite! Good times - until you get caught up in an increasingly common pre-Oscar game: Finding fault in hopeful winners for reasons that have nothing to do with how good or bad a movie might be.
Maybe you skipped Selma because you heard its portrayal of LBJ was historically inaccurate. Perhaps you stayed away from American Sniper because you heard it glorifies killing. Or you may have dodged Birdman because it misrepresents the short fiction of Raymond Carver.
OK, so nobody did that, but you get the point. The intensity and velocity of the Oscar-season smear rises every year. Someone -- an angry historian, an interest group, a whispering rival studio bagman -- sees a wedge issue to exploit, a controversy to manufacture. We in the media run with it and twist it into various rhetorical permutations.
The backlash turns into the backlash against the backlash, which turns into the backlash against the backlash against the backlash. When the smoke clears, a perfectly worthy movie like Selma can end up with a paltry two Oscar nominations.
The perils are particularly acute for historical and current-events drama. Remember what happened to Zero Dark Thirty in late 2012? Kathryn Bigelow's hunt-for-Osama thriller was riding high until the chorus started: It's pro-torture! That's not how it happened! Even U.S. senators got in on the act, which might help explain why so little seems to get done in Washington. Perhaps they're all at the movies.
The backlash turns into the backlash against the backlash, which turns into the backlash against the backlash against the backlash.
Film historian and critic Mark Harris put it perfectly in his recent column for the online publication Grantland, "How 'Selma' Got Smeared."
"To the scholars, commentators, interested parties, ideologues and point-scorers that now make it an annual sport to dismantle these films and their creators, this is the head of the pin on which historical dramas are forced to pirouette: They must first be elevated to a status greater than that of mere movies -- after all, think of the innocent children who might see them and mistake them for books -- but only so that they can be knocked down because they are less than true."
Part of the dilemma lies in the visceral immediacy and accessibility of cinema. Moving images have tremendous power: Legend has it that the audience panicked at an early screening of the Lumière brothers' 1895 short, "The Arrival of a Train at ." They thought the train was busting into the screening room. Even now movies can put us in a sort of trance. We can momentarily forget what's real, or what's supposed to be.
Imagine if literature were held to the same standard of verisimilitude. I love Don DeLillo's labyrinthine, paranoid JFK assassination novel Libra, but I accept it as a work of creative imagination, not a historical document. There are those who haven't reached a point where they can accept a Hollywood movie as the visual version of historical fiction.
Or maybe they can, only to find the strategy and easy headlines of the smear impossible to resist. A big Oscar win can mean millions of dollars, not to mention a gooey dollop of ego in an industry that runs on the stuff. As in a political campaign, it's easier to create a smoke-screen distraction than honestly debate merits.
Thus the veneer of Oscar glamour gives way to a series of opportunistic food fights - at least until we stop eating it up.
