Slumdog Millionaire and the Acadamy
The heart of what's wrong with the Acadamy of Arts and Sciences Awards is evidenced by the Best Picture award given to Slumdog Millionaire in February of 2009. And a hint at who controls the Acadamy. That is, if you needed a hint, anyone who takes a second to look at the money needed to support that industry knows where the control is coming from.
Slumdog is not well acted particularly. The male lead envinces few emotions or any particular strong character traits. The female lead is even shallower, we barely know a thing about her. Supporting characters are thin charactures of standard prototypes. So it wasn't the acting.
The plot is both trite and vastly incomplete. Trite rags-to-riches, offering nothing particularly new but the random chance that the game show questions had a analog in the young man's life. That's syncronicity, not plot.
The development of the plot is even worse. The Why of any of the actions or motivations, other than the foundational survival ones, don't make sense. And the links that are drawn are again, trite and incomplete.
Why did S.D. win?
Guilt and control. A classic Acadamy guilt/control award.
Slumdog was the first exposure most Americans (who have the most influence with the Acadamy) had to the realities of a Mumbai slum to the near-real level of dispair, filth, and density. The middle class were hit with a huge load of guilt seeing that, and the lower class were hit with a huge sense of sympatico, that's where they are.
Then the Industry took over.
Add dashes of humor, a happy ending (for two of the 19 million people in Mumbai, at least), and a rollicing dance number at the end and the perceptions were made to serve.
The middle class got to shrug off the guilt with no pain or action. Look, they may have come from a slum, but aren't they happy! Happier than I am, so it must be OK to grow up in a slum!
Here's an acadamy award for making us feel guilty for 40 minutes, then spending 40 more minutes making all that guilt melt away and we leave the theater feeling happy.
Here's an acadamy award for showing you someone worse off than you who gets out of it, so please don't complain or riot, just work hard and learn from tv.
The Acadamy rewards that type of film, since it keeps people coming back to theaters when they are out of a job in the worst economic downturn in 80 years. Fake happiness and reward on a movie screen have been keeping the poor, the scared, the bewildered coming into movie theaters for a very long time, and the big money that funds films wants that false hope on the screen every week.
And this year, picking an Indian film, is the seal on a pact across the oceans for both industries, Hollywood and Bollywood, can continue to foist tripe on a terrified, hopeless, and poor populace and keep them in check. Rewarding too the clever film that talks to those who have a little and who might think of helping someone else, might be feeling a little guilty, and tells them that No, no, really, those people are fine and they're all really happy and can get rich, richer than you!
Enjoy your award, Slumdog.
For all you aspiring filmmakers, camera operators, script writers, and so on who think that your vision and talent, who want to create a Slumdog story that ends in the death and dispair that truely surrond Mumbai (or Mexico CIty, or Detroit) every day, will get you that award, sorry, this year's awards once again demonstrate that the top awards will always go to that which keeps the Acadamy in power, not Art.
Slumdog is not well acted particularly. The male lead envinces few emotions or any particular strong character traits. The female lead is even shallower, we barely know a thing about her. Supporting characters are thin charactures of standard prototypes. So it wasn't the acting.
The plot is both trite and vastly incomplete. Trite rags-to-riches, offering nothing particularly new but the random chance that the game show questions had a analog in the young man's life. That's syncronicity, not plot.
The development of the plot is even worse. The Why of any of the actions or motivations, other than the foundational survival ones, don't make sense. And the links that are drawn are again, trite and incomplete.
Why did S.D. win?
Guilt and control. A classic Acadamy guilt/control award.
Slumdog was the first exposure most Americans (who have the most influence with the Acadamy) had to the realities of a Mumbai slum to the near-real level of dispair, filth, and density. The middle class were hit with a huge load of guilt seeing that, and the lower class were hit with a huge sense of sympatico, that's where they are.
Then the Industry took over.
Add dashes of humor, a happy ending (for two of the 19 million people in Mumbai, at least), and a rollicing dance number at the end and the perceptions were made to serve.
The middle class got to shrug off the guilt with no pain or action. Look, they may have come from a slum, but aren't they happy! Happier than I am, so it must be OK to grow up in a slum!
Here's an acadamy award for making us feel guilty for 40 minutes, then spending 40 more minutes making all that guilt melt away and we leave the theater feeling happy.
Here's an acadamy award for showing you someone worse off than you who gets out of it, so please don't complain or riot, just work hard and learn from tv.
The Acadamy rewards that type of film, since it keeps people coming back to theaters when they are out of a job in the worst economic downturn in 80 years. Fake happiness and reward on a movie screen have been keeping the poor, the scared, the bewildered coming into movie theaters for a very long time, and the big money that funds films wants that false hope on the screen every week.
And this year, picking an Indian film, is the seal on a pact across the oceans for both industries, Hollywood and Bollywood, can continue to foist tripe on a terrified, hopeless, and poor populace and keep them in check. Rewarding too the clever film that talks to those who have a little and who might think of helping someone else, might be feeling a little guilty, and tells them that No, no, really, those people are fine and they're all really happy and can get rich, richer than you!
Enjoy your award, Slumdog.
For all you aspiring filmmakers, camera operators, script writers, and so on who think that your vision and talent, who want to create a Slumdog story that ends in the death and dispair that truely surrond Mumbai (or Mexico CIty, or Detroit) every day, will get you that award, sorry, this year's awards once again demonstrate that the top awards will always go to that which keeps the Acadamy in power, not Art.
posted by Alex Kinnison at 10:03 PM
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