I sometimes think that we find more palatable the hypothesis, for which I've never seen even suggestive evidence, that Judas betrayed Jesus because he wanted to force his hand, to speed up his Messianic timetable, instead of the stated reason, thirty pieces of silver, because we're frightened that this man, our prototype, betrayed the son of God for something as petty as money.
I once read that someone, Milton maybe, had suggested that Adam ate the fruit in the Garden to save Eve from destruction, to bear their punishment together. Because how frightening is it that Adam, the progenitor of the entire human race, ate the fruit because it looked tasty? That simple pleasure drove him to commit a heinous act.
If Judas wasn't a revolutionary, a freedom fighter, and thus a tragic figure, in the Aristotelean sense, but instead a petty thief, as John insists, who believed in Jesus, but loved life's little pleasures, if all he was thinking about when he kissed the master's cheek was wine and olives, maybe some good meat, then we, all of us, must look again to our noble motives in each sinful act. Am I lustful because I simply love women or because I like pleasure? Am I dishonest because I don't want people to feel bad or because I know honesty put Jesus on a cross? Am I lazy because of depression or because I found an excuse?
I began this while reading a piece by Morton T. Kelsey called "The Cross and the Cellar," which begins thus: "Each of us has underneath our ordinary personality, which we show to the public, a cellar in which we hide the refuse and rubbish which we would rather not see ourselves or let others see. And below that is a deeper hold in which there are dragons and demons, a truly hellish place, full of violence and hatred and viciousness."
I am firmly of the opinion, which I think I gained from reading Lewis, whether he would agree with me or not, that the deepest depravity of the human heart is not found in death camps, but in the petty pleasures that cause us to cheat on our spouses or even just torture them with unnecessary and ill-founded critiques. The little cruelties, with which we can make our collective lives a veritable hell, when we consider that the motive is not hate, or even irrational fear, but the pleasure we gain from them, are among the more frightening things we can see in our hearts or those of others. I feel that we've become unduly frightened by the sociopath, the person who coldly watches the emotional lives of others without empathy. Forgive me if I misuse the term. But I remember a far more frightening sight, looking into the eyes of your torturers and seeing only enjoyment, only laughter looking back at you.
In fact, well on our side of the wall we put between ourselves and the "monsters" we think of as being responsible for the state of the world, terrorists, bankers, politicians, etc., we find ourselves, venal, vain, and greedy and responsible, with all the rest, for the state the world is in.
And it is in our perceived virtues that our vices hide. As a young man, I believed myself to be of great faith, because I never doubt the existence of God. And one day, as I basked in this self-assurance, the Almighty assured me that my faith was a farce, that it was because of my lack of faith that I had been granted such a clear path to belief, because he had pity on me. Pride masquerades as faith, and judgmentalism as purity and laziness or cowardice as patience.
Lewis once pointed out that the Good News rested on a Bad News that used to be taken for granted, which we must be careful to accept in order to avoid the pitfall of pride and feel the value of what's on offer in the gospel.
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Saturday, January 31, 2015
The Patriots, Deflategate, and Learning to Love with the Help of Team Sports
Today I'm going to discuss something close to my heart on many levels. Tomorrow, the NFL team I have supported for many years, the New England Patriots, are playing in yet another Super Bowl. For all the doubters, I tried to nail down when I became a Boston sports fan. I can't be certain. I remember the Patriots with Bledsoe. The first step for me was when the Celtics drafted Paul Pierce in the '98 NBA draft. Add to that the phenomenal philosopher, Peter Kreeft from Boston College, and you'll find the awkward beginnings of my rocky romance with Boston sports. But that's not our issue.
The issue, or at least the reason I'm writing about it now, has been referred to variously as Inflate-gate, Deflate-gate, and Ball-ghazi. I applaud the last one for seeking to find a more up to date reference for a common scandal than that of Watergate, which brought down a president just over forty years ago. Regardless of what it's called, this scandal has gotten a lot of coverage and presents me with a conundrum. But to fully explicate this conundrum, I feel I must lay out a theory I've been honing for at least five years. My theory insists that sports fandom, true sports fandom, done in the way of the old school, is a powerful tool for teaching human beings to love.
Someone will surely be saying, just on reading that, "Isn't this a disordered kind of love? giving yourself to something so silly as a sports franchise?" I would point out that I did not say it is a mature and full kind of love. Hopefully an adult will love many people and things more than he loves any sports team. If you're still reading with Hooked on Phonics when your sixteen, you're doing it wrong. That doesn't invalidate it as a system of learning. Some other things might, but not that. Sports are training wheels for love.
Some will say that training wheels come off when you're riding a bike. Should we outgrow sports? I would respond that loving is a far harder thing to master than riding a bike. It's a skill more akin to learning a language, a thing never truly mastered.
But I have not yet explained the mechanism by which sports enable us to learn to love in a meaningful way. The first point to be made is that a sports team has one key thing in common with real people that books and many other areas of interest do not. Week after week, year after year, the actions of a sports franchise will continue to tug on your heart strings. They will win or lose again and again. Again compared to video games or some other form of interactive entertainment, they surpass them because a sports team is not just an extension of yourself. If you lose in a game, the pain is caused by your love of self. Your pride might be hurt. But when you focus on the well-being of a truly external thing, you begin to approach real love.
Like anything, it can be distorted. When I was a kid, Michael Jordan was the Bulls and the Bulls, Michael Jordan. You could never imagine him going anywhere else. Until he did. Once upon a time, people and athletes had a sense of loyalty now lost. I'm not sure, but I find it hard to believe it's a coincidence that it has simultaneously become less likely for a player to stay with a franchise all his life and for a man to stay with his wife all his life. Now we have LeBron and his weird traveling show as well as Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard not being able to just play out their final seasons at the clubs they served so long. None of this is conducive to real love. If you switch teams every few years or have about six teams depending on who's playing well at the moment, you will not learn real love. It's just like having a new lover every night or abandoning your family when they no longer suit you. Bad fandom is analogous with the distorted and twisted views of love that pervade our world today.
As a side note, I recently heard someone say that real love can't hurt you. This is absolute nonsense. Pain is one of the cornerstones of love. It is only valuable because it withstands pain and loss. If love were not stronger than death, strong enough to cause you pain and still be worthwhile, it would truly be worthless.
Going back to our evaluation of the mechanism, I'll compare it to a more standard way to learn how to love. Most people, I hope, are taught to love by their parents. If done right, that is incomparable with this. Initially, neither teach us to be unselfish, but eventually the love of our parents can teach us unselfishness by example, at least. The experience of love with a team will never, on its own, lead us to love a thing for its own sake.
This is a valid criticism. I will not suggest that sports partisanship will make us a full human being, but along with a steady diet of books, films, music, and interpersonal relations can be part of a balanced human. Not only can it be part of a balanced human, but it might even provide things that a geek like me might miss if he never involved himself. Like pet ownership, it isn't a replacement for meaningful human interaction, but it is a useful aid to it.
So, regardless of whether I've made converts of you all, I move to the situation at hand. The Patriots have again (if you don't know to what I'm referring, google Spygate) been very believably accused of cheating. Earlier they were accused of trying to learn the opposing teams defensive signals by videotaping them. They were punished and the matter seemed a slight embarrassment at the time (mostly because it was a relatively recent rule and Belichick, to my mind, had plausible deniability in that he said it was cause by a mere misinterpretation on his part). This instance is harder to understand. I have not investigated it enough really have a solid opinion on the matter of whether what the Patriots did was cheating or not.
All in all, though, the reason it seemed important to discuss all this now is the aforementioned conundrum. If this whole sports partisanship deal is supposed to train me for loving well my fellow man, then how do I handle the very real possibility that the team I love may have cheated in the process of getting to the game in which I might be cheering them on tomorrow? To answer this, I considered an example of love from my own experience as a guide to how I should respond.
One of the most important incidents in my life is one that occurred during my fifth grade year. This particular day I did some things which remind me of Augustine telling of how he and his friends once stole pears from a local orchard and threw them at pigs. Augustine seemed to struck by the sheer destructive wastefulness of this act. Around this time, I was entering a period of my life where the quality of my moral sense, in both actions and attitudes, was getting considerably worse. This more or less coincided with an increase in popularity among my peers at school. Take from that what you will.
I was in class and our teacher decided to play a standard academic trivia game with the class, splitting us into teams. I insisted at some point to be on the same team as one of my best and oldest friends and was denied. Petulant child that I was, I decided to deliberately throw the game by volunteering obviously wrong answers before my teammates could try. My teacher called me on it and insisted that I confess. We haven't even gotten to the worst part. At the end of the day, my parents were called in to the principal to deal with my lack of compliance. My parents took me aside and asked me earnestly whether I was telling the truth and I lied boldly and animatedly to their faces. From that moment on, my parents went to bat for me and a few minutes later, we went home and I was never formally punished for it.
I consider that one of the lowest and most cowardly acts of my life, but the focus in this instant is on the reaction of my parents. Is this similar to Aslan's self-sacrifice for Edmund on the Stone Table (which one might hope is very similar to its model in the Lord's sacrifice for us)? Is this some kind of guide as to how I should deal with the Patriots? Maybe I'm a little better off than Aslan and the Lord. They both knew the one they meant to save was guilty and they didn't have to worry about whether to support them. They could recognize the wrongness of the action, but choose to spare the guilty party some of the possible consequences.
My parents situation then was closer to what I face now. What my parents chose to do was back me up. I was a lying sack of it, but they couldn't be sure so they backed me up anyway. This brings to mind another post I've been working on, one that deals with our willingness to condemn someone before they've been solidly convicted. Whether its Joe Paterno or Darren Wilson, we are all too willing to pass judgment as soon as possible so we can be seen to be the first one to pounce on alleged injustices. Like we think we'll get a prize, and often do socially, for being quick to condemn wrongdoing. I don't know and upon further investigation I don't believe anyone knows whether or at least to what extent the Patriots may have cheated.
So I think I'll back them. Someday it may come out that I was wrong and that this will be discovered to be an open and shut case of cheating which permeates a team I love, from Belichick to Brady to Gronk to Amendola, Edelman, Gostkowski, and Jonas Gray. On that day, I'll capitulate. I'll tell everybody they were right and won't complain a bit when we're stripped of all our Super Bowls. Because I do believe that cheating, genuine cheating, is a disgrace and a dishonor to us all. But just in case that day never comes, I'm going to enjoy this Super Bowl, most especially if we can find a way to win. I'll cheer and brag with abandon. And if we lose, I might cry. I'll probably pout a little. I'll most definitely be in a funk for a few days. At least.
I'll do all this and be embarrassed, concerned, and ashamed anytime they're accused of cheating in the same way I was embarrassed and concerned when my nephew got suspended from school. The same way I was depressed when my brother lost custody of his kids. The same way I was excited when my nephew read "To Kill a Mockingbird" in one day. Like the truest of loves, it will make me happy when things are good and sad when things are bad. Because it matters, because it really matters.
The issue, or at least the reason I'm writing about it now, has been referred to variously as Inflate-gate, Deflate-gate, and Ball-ghazi. I applaud the last one for seeking to find a more up to date reference for a common scandal than that of Watergate, which brought down a president just over forty years ago. Regardless of what it's called, this scandal has gotten a lot of coverage and presents me with a conundrum. But to fully explicate this conundrum, I feel I must lay out a theory I've been honing for at least five years. My theory insists that sports fandom, true sports fandom, done in the way of the old school, is a powerful tool for teaching human beings to love.
Someone will surely be saying, just on reading that, "Isn't this a disordered kind of love? giving yourself to something so silly as a sports franchise?" I would point out that I did not say it is a mature and full kind of love. Hopefully an adult will love many people and things more than he loves any sports team. If you're still reading with Hooked on Phonics when your sixteen, you're doing it wrong. That doesn't invalidate it as a system of learning. Some other things might, but not that. Sports are training wheels for love.
Some will say that training wheels come off when you're riding a bike. Should we outgrow sports? I would respond that loving is a far harder thing to master than riding a bike. It's a skill more akin to learning a language, a thing never truly mastered.
But I have not yet explained the mechanism by which sports enable us to learn to love in a meaningful way. The first point to be made is that a sports team has one key thing in common with real people that books and many other areas of interest do not. Week after week, year after year, the actions of a sports franchise will continue to tug on your heart strings. They will win or lose again and again. Again compared to video games or some other form of interactive entertainment, they surpass them because a sports team is not just an extension of yourself. If you lose in a game, the pain is caused by your love of self. Your pride might be hurt. But when you focus on the well-being of a truly external thing, you begin to approach real love.
Like anything, it can be distorted. When I was a kid, Michael Jordan was the Bulls and the Bulls, Michael Jordan. You could never imagine him going anywhere else. Until he did. Once upon a time, people and athletes had a sense of loyalty now lost. I'm not sure, but I find it hard to believe it's a coincidence that it has simultaneously become less likely for a player to stay with a franchise all his life and for a man to stay with his wife all his life. Now we have LeBron and his weird traveling show as well as Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard not being able to just play out their final seasons at the clubs they served so long. None of this is conducive to real love. If you switch teams every few years or have about six teams depending on who's playing well at the moment, you will not learn real love. It's just like having a new lover every night or abandoning your family when they no longer suit you. Bad fandom is analogous with the distorted and twisted views of love that pervade our world today.
As a side note, I recently heard someone say that real love can't hurt you. This is absolute nonsense. Pain is one of the cornerstones of love. It is only valuable because it withstands pain and loss. If love were not stronger than death, strong enough to cause you pain and still be worthwhile, it would truly be worthless.
Going back to our evaluation of the mechanism, I'll compare it to a more standard way to learn how to love. Most people, I hope, are taught to love by their parents. If done right, that is incomparable with this. Initially, neither teach us to be unselfish, but eventually the love of our parents can teach us unselfishness by example, at least. The experience of love with a team will never, on its own, lead us to love a thing for its own sake.
This is a valid criticism. I will not suggest that sports partisanship will make us a full human being, but along with a steady diet of books, films, music, and interpersonal relations can be part of a balanced human. Not only can it be part of a balanced human, but it might even provide things that a geek like me might miss if he never involved himself. Like pet ownership, it isn't a replacement for meaningful human interaction, but it is a useful aid to it.
So, regardless of whether I've made converts of you all, I move to the situation at hand. The Patriots have again (if you don't know to what I'm referring, google Spygate) been very believably accused of cheating. Earlier they were accused of trying to learn the opposing teams defensive signals by videotaping them. They were punished and the matter seemed a slight embarrassment at the time (mostly because it was a relatively recent rule and Belichick, to my mind, had plausible deniability in that he said it was cause by a mere misinterpretation on his part). This instance is harder to understand. I have not investigated it enough really have a solid opinion on the matter of whether what the Patriots did was cheating or not.
All in all, though, the reason it seemed important to discuss all this now is the aforementioned conundrum. If this whole sports partisanship deal is supposed to train me for loving well my fellow man, then how do I handle the very real possibility that the team I love may have cheated in the process of getting to the game in which I might be cheering them on tomorrow? To answer this, I considered an example of love from my own experience as a guide to how I should respond.
One of the most important incidents in my life is one that occurred during my fifth grade year. This particular day I did some things which remind me of Augustine telling of how he and his friends once stole pears from a local orchard and threw them at pigs. Augustine seemed to struck by the sheer destructive wastefulness of this act. Around this time, I was entering a period of my life where the quality of my moral sense, in both actions and attitudes, was getting considerably worse. This more or less coincided with an increase in popularity among my peers at school. Take from that what you will.
I was in class and our teacher decided to play a standard academic trivia game with the class, splitting us into teams. I insisted at some point to be on the same team as one of my best and oldest friends and was denied. Petulant child that I was, I decided to deliberately throw the game by volunteering obviously wrong answers before my teammates could try. My teacher called me on it and insisted that I confess. We haven't even gotten to the worst part. At the end of the day, my parents were called in to the principal to deal with my lack of compliance. My parents took me aside and asked me earnestly whether I was telling the truth and I lied boldly and animatedly to their faces. From that moment on, my parents went to bat for me and a few minutes later, we went home and I was never formally punished for it.
I consider that one of the lowest and most cowardly acts of my life, but the focus in this instant is on the reaction of my parents. Is this similar to Aslan's self-sacrifice for Edmund on the Stone Table (which one might hope is very similar to its model in the Lord's sacrifice for us)? Is this some kind of guide as to how I should deal with the Patriots? Maybe I'm a little better off than Aslan and the Lord. They both knew the one they meant to save was guilty and they didn't have to worry about whether to support them. They could recognize the wrongness of the action, but choose to spare the guilty party some of the possible consequences.
My parents situation then was closer to what I face now. What my parents chose to do was back me up. I was a lying sack of it, but they couldn't be sure so they backed me up anyway. This brings to mind another post I've been working on, one that deals with our willingness to condemn someone before they've been solidly convicted. Whether its Joe Paterno or Darren Wilson, we are all too willing to pass judgment as soon as possible so we can be seen to be the first one to pounce on alleged injustices. Like we think we'll get a prize, and often do socially, for being quick to condemn wrongdoing. I don't know and upon further investigation I don't believe anyone knows whether or at least to what extent the Patriots may have cheated.
So I think I'll back them. Someday it may come out that I was wrong and that this will be discovered to be an open and shut case of cheating which permeates a team I love, from Belichick to Brady to Gronk to Amendola, Edelman, Gostkowski, and Jonas Gray. On that day, I'll capitulate. I'll tell everybody they were right and won't complain a bit when we're stripped of all our Super Bowls. Because I do believe that cheating, genuine cheating, is a disgrace and a dishonor to us all. But just in case that day never comes, I'm going to enjoy this Super Bowl, most especially if we can find a way to win. I'll cheer and brag with abandon. And if we lose, I might cry. I'll probably pout a little. I'll most definitely be in a funk for a few days. At least.
I'll do all this and be embarrassed, concerned, and ashamed anytime they're accused of cheating in the same way I was embarrassed and concerned when my nephew got suspended from school. The same way I was depressed when my brother lost custody of his kids. The same way I was excited when my nephew read "To Kill a Mockingbird" in one day. Like the truest of loves, it will make me happy when things are good and sad when things are bad. Because it matters, because it really matters.
Friday, January 23, 2015
Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Race?
I've previously written in two other blogs on more specific topics, but this blog will feature my opining (sounds better than opinions to me) and writing on various topics. It's the closest thing I have so far to a complete compendium of my titular "grand, overarching, overall theory of everything." I should note I came up with this name prior to hearing of the Best Picture nominee about Stephen Hawking. But I like that dude enough to bow to him if he came up with the phrase first. I've been waiting for the right moment to begin this blog for a while. This may not be that moment, but I've grown tired of waiting.
Recently, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revealed its nominations for their prestigious awards for 2015. All twenty of the nominees for the four acting categories are, by any definition, white. On top of this, all the Best Director nominees are, arguably, white males (arguably white not male, that's another topic for another day). This has led to a great deal of controversy and the hashtag #oscarssowhite. I've included a link to an article on the issue here. I did not read this article, short as it is, but scanned it, as it deserved. Mortimer would be proud.
I also found an interesting, if incomplete letter to the editor detailing how the odds, minus prejudice, actually predict that once every 14 years we'd have an Oscars without a black nominee. It's been 17. I only fact checked the initial stat that African-Americans make up one eighth of America's population. It is, as said, incomplete, as it only addresses the black portion of the race question and ignores the female one, but it is both interesting and linked here.
Now I'm not here, in this moment, to defend the Academy. The Academy has committed a long series of indefensible acts which I will not try to defend by any means, nor will I try to rank them. I will, however, note the greatest and most absurd snub of this Oscars is actually the failure to nominate The Lego Movie for Best Animated Feature. If you haven't seen it, do. Regardless of age.
My larger point revolves around one of the other most notably snubbed films, the Martin Luther King Jr. biopic, Selma. Two African-Americans, one of whom is a woman, form the most notably snubbed parties. I agree in each instance that the artists snubbed surpassed at least one of those nominated. Because I haven't seen every film nominated, I will perhaps unfairly denigrate the one I've seen whose constituent artists are clearly below the bar set by those who created Selma(The Imitation Game).
For Best Actor, David Oyelowo should have been nominated for playing MLK in a deep, subtle, and moving way, exploring all the facets of this complex and complicated man with clarity and courage. Now, I am championing David Oyelowo and I think that minus references to his character, a noted black civil rights leader, you might not have been able to tell what his race was. I'm going to say the obvious thing or what should be the obvious thing. I will say that the man who played the historical personage well-known for saying, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," should not be nominated for any award because of "the color of (his) skin, but (because of) the content of (his performance)."
In my opinion, however, there is no question, comparing only the two films, that Oyelowo deserves the Oscar and the nod over Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game. Cumberbatch's portrayal leaves him somewhat typecast as the 'strange' outsider who doesn't really get along with his peers, but proves brilliant and invaluable in the end. This character should be familiar to anyone who's seen BBC's Sherlock or 2013's Star Trek Into Darkness. Otherwise his performance is good, with amusing bits and heart-wrenching moments, but I think, hardly Oscar-worthy.
I'm going to move on to the director of this film. Beyond the work of the actors, this film came together with such clarity of vision and attention to detail that it opened this historical moment to new eyes like seeing it for the first time. It did so with shocking visual elements which I won't ruin, but simply note: be prepared to be surprised. It is very easy for the historical biopic to be stuffy and dull, but this film exuded brilliance, fire, and living energy in a way that makes Gandhi (a great film worth a watch, by the way) seem dull and pale by comparison. It's the obvious heart-pounding moments of excitement and confrontation and the incisive portrayal of the behind-the-scenes tension.
In comparison, The Imitation Game lacked narrative flow and involved some dull moments, including an intelligent, secretive, shy person divulging, unbidden, his most dear, personal, and dangerous secret to a relative stranger to set up a silly plot device. There is overall very little to justify a Best Director nomination for Morten Tyldum.
A person could read the paragraph on Ava DuVernay and Selma and not know the race or gender of the directer, a thing done by choice. It makes me cry for the future of our nation and world when the conversation about what is good and beautiful and true in our arts is bogged down in questions of race and gender that should have been jettisoned from these conversations long ago.
Now before some people turn off, I'm looking at you American University of Paris friends, I am not suggesting that race and gender are unimportant as concepts or that they shouldn't contribute to any conversations. At least gender is a foundational concept to human discourse. Race, if we substitute something more intellectually meaningful like culture or background, can also be helpful, even in the context of film and other arts. But societally, when we look at who is getting awards and who does the best work, we have to be comfortable with the law of averages saying that sometimes the winners won't be representative. If we want to fight racial, cultural, or gender discrimination, we need to do it positively, by encouraging and supporting the films we see by people of various backgrounds and hope that more Ava DuVernays keep coming, that power, in the form of art and otherwise, continues to be given to the best and never to the whitest, blackest, malest or femalest.
I'd also like to express some real reservation about the prejudices of Academy voting that I think might be real and account for more mistakes than racism. Or even sexism. It is the desire to further causes that one thinks are worth furthering. This goes insane with the Best Documentary Feature category, which went to The Cove in '10, despite its preachy, over-emotional appeals and lack of serious credentials vs. three much more worthy contenders (at least) in Burma VJ, Food Inc., and The Most Dangerous Man in America. In this case, The Imitation Game, which is a decent film about a fascinating individual who saved countless lives and is under-appreciated and deserves to be known. Another interesting tidbit, which at times dominates the film, is that he was gay. And also that he killed himself due to the chemical castration forced on him by the British government.
Let's just get this out of the way. Do I think what they did to that man is horrible and thankless? Yes. Am I glad that they made a major motion picture about him? Yes. Do I think that that film deserves eight Oscar nominations at the expense of Selma? No. Do I think that voters' decisions were affected by the desire to stand up for gay people? Yes. Do I think that anyone had a dinner conversation that included the line, "We've done race at the Oscars, but now is the time to stand up for gay rights"? Yes. Do I have direct documentary evidence of this? No. So here we are. Shame on you, hypothetical Academy voters who are swayed by politics of gender, race, sexual orientation, or any other irrelevant category in your Oscar voting.
Well, I've spouted off and I enjoyed it. Let's do this again sometime. Enjoyez?
Recently, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revealed its nominations for their prestigious awards for 2015. All twenty of the nominees for the four acting categories are, by any definition, white. On top of this, all the Best Director nominees are, arguably, white males (arguably white not male, that's another topic for another day). This has led to a great deal of controversy and the hashtag #oscarssowhite. I've included a link to an article on the issue here. I did not read this article, short as it is, but scanned it, as it deserved. Mortimer would be proud.
I also found an interesting, if incomplete letter to the editor detailing how the odds, minus prejudice, actually predict that once every 14 years we'd have an Oscars without a black nominee. It's been 17. I only fact checked the initial stat that African-Americans make up one eighth of America's population. It is, as said, incomplete, as it only addresses the black portion of the race question and ignores the female one, but it is both interesting and linked here.
Now I'm not here, in this moment, to defend the Academy. The Academy has committed a long series of indefensible acts which I will not try to defend by any means, nor will I try to rank them. I will, however, note the greatest and most absurd snub of this Oscars is actually the failure to nominate The Lego Movie for Best Animated Feature. If you haven't seen it, do. Regardless of age.
My larger point revolves around one of the other most notably snubbed films, the Martin Luther King Jr. biopic, Selma. Two African-Americans, one of whom is a woman, form the most notably snubbed parties. I agree in each instance that the artists snubbed surpassed at least one of those nominated. Because I haven't seen every film nominated, I will perhaps unfairly denigrate the one I've seen whose constituent artists are clearly below the bar set by those who created Selma(The Imitation Game).
For Best Actor, David Oyelowo should have been nominated for playing MLK in a deep, subtle, and moving way, exploring all the facets of this complex and complicated man with clarity and courage. Now, I am championing David Oyelowo and I think that minus references to his character, a noted black civil rights leader, you might not have been able to tell what his race was. I'm going to say the obvious thing or what should be the obvious thing. I will say that the man who played the historical personage well-known for saying, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," should not be nominated for any award because of "the color of (his) skin, but (because of) the content of (his performance)."
In my opinion, however, there is no question, comparing only the two films, that Oyelowo deserves the Oscar and the nod over Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game. Cumberbatch's portrayal leaves him somewhat typecast as the 'strange' outsider who doesn't really get along with his peers, but proves brilliant and invaluable in the end. This character should be familiar to anyone who's seen BBC's Sherlock or 2013's Star Trek Into Darkness. Otherwise his performance is good, with amusing bits and heart-wrenching moments, but I think, hardly Oscar-worthy.
I'm going to move on to the director of this film. Beyond the work of the actors, this film came together with such clarity of vision and attention to detail that it opened this historical moment to new eyes like seeing it for the first time. It did so with shocking visual elements which I won't ruin, but simply note: be prepared to be surprised. It is very easy for the historical biopic to be stuffy and dull, but this film exuded brilliance, fire, and living energy in a way that makes Gandhi (a great film worth a watch, by the way) seem dull and pale by comparison. It's the obvious heart-pounding moments of excitement and confrontation and the incisive portrayal of the behind-the-scenes tension.
In comparison, The Imitation Game lacked narrative flow and involved some dull moments, including an intelligent, secretive, shy person divulging, unbidden, his most dear, personal, and dangerous secret to a relative stranger to set up a silly plot device. There is overall very little to justify a Best Director nomination for Morten Tyldum.
A person could read the paragraph on Ava DuVernay and Selma and not know the race or gender of the directer, a thing done by choice. It makes me cry for the future of our nation and world when the conversation about what is good and beautiful and true in our arts is bogged down in questions of race and gender that should have been jettisoned from these conversations long ago.
Now before some people turn off, I'm looking at you American University of Paris friends, I am not suggesting that race and gender are unimportant as concepts or that they shouldn't contribute to any conversations. At least gender is a foundational concept to human discourse. Race, if we substitute something more intellectually meaningful like culture or background, can also be helpful, even in the context of film and other arts. But societally, when we look at who is getting awards and who does the best work, we have to be comfortable with the law of averages saying that sometimes the winners won't be representative. If we want to fight racial, cultural, or gender discrimination, we need to do it positively, by encouraging and supporting the films we see by people of various backgrounds and hope that more Ava DuVernays keep coming, that power, in the form of art and otherwise, continues to be given to the best and never to the whitest, blackest, malest or femalest.
I'd also like to express some real reservation about the prejudices of Academy voting that I think might be real and account for more mistakes than racism. Or even sexism. It is the desire to further causes that one thinks are worth furthering. This goes insane with the Best Documentary Feature category, which went to The Cove in '10, despite its preachy, over-emotional appeals and lack of serious credentials vs. three much more worthy contenders (at least) in Burma VJ, Food Inc., and The Most Dangerous Man in America. In this case, The Imitation Game, which is a decent film about a fascinating individual who saved countless lives and is under-appreciated and deserves to be known. Another interesting tidbit, which at times dominates the film, is that he was gay. And also that he killed himself due to the chemical castration forced on him by the British government.
Let's just get this out of the way. Do I think what they did to that man is horrible and thankless? Yes. Am I glad that they made a major motion picture about him? Yes. Do I think that that film deserves eight Oscar nominations at the expense of Selma? No. Do I think that voters' decisions were affected by the desire to stand up for gay people? Yes. Do I think that anyone had a dinner conversation that included the line, "We've done race at the Oscars, but now is the time to stand up for gay rights"? Yes. Do I have direct documentary evidence of this? No. So here we are. Shame on you, hypothetical Academy voters who are swayed by politics of gender, race, sexual orientation, or any other irrelevant category in your Oscar voting.
Well, I've spouted off and I enjoyed it. Let's do this again sometime. Enjoyez?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)