The Academy's Awards

Sunday night’s Academy Awards show was fascinating, and not just for its repeated expressions of Hollywood solidarity with America’s troops, “wherever they may be” and voicing the ambiguously-antiwar hope that they will come home safe and soon.

After snubbing ultra-leftwing mercenary Michael Moore, as well as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the top Academy Awards went to nominally-Republican Clint Eastwood for his flick Million Dollar Baby, a female boxing film that justifies euthanasia.

Left out of the Director winner’s circle after his fifth nomination was Martin Scorsese, 63, who 25 years ago came to fame with the boxing movie Raging Bull (1980). His Sicilian-Italian-American eye has created Gangs of New York (2002), Taxi Driver (1976), the organized crime portrait Goodfellas (1990) and The Aviator (2004).

“A lot of people said there was too much pointless violence in Goodfellas,” Scorsese said in Sunday’s Times of London, “but to me there is no such thing.”

Scorsese began as an Altar Boy at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, then in 1956 entered seminary with plans to become a priest (not unlike Michael Moore). He would later direct the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ that depicted Jesus on the cross tempted by a DaVinci Code-like image of passion with Mary Magdelene.

Five marriages later, Scorsese is not without a faith. Hollywood is put off not only by the stark violence of his vision, but also because Scorsese stuck to his guns (and so, to its credit, did Disney Corp.) in making Kundun (1997). This life of the Dalai Lama showed Communist China’s brutal invasion and rape of Tibet. Beijing threatened commercial retaliation again Disney (and Hollywood) if it released this movie. Scorsese is to this day one of only 50 people officially prohibited by China from entering Tibet. Perhaps this is one factor that explains why more Hollywood figures are careful not to embrace Scorsese too warmly. Greed mixed with left ideology make a powerful cocktail.

Shock comic Chris Rock was apparently chosen emcee of Sunday's Academy Awards to boost the broadcast’s rating in a year where not a single nominated Best Picture earned $100 million. (The Passion of the Christ has earned $700 million but was dismissed into petty award categories, winning nothing.) Rock apparently delivered the best TV ratings since 2000, but his performance was too tepid to be hot and too smarmy to be tasteful – the worst of both worlds.

Film critic Roger Ebert fumed that nobody had been bothered by Chris Rock except Internet newster Matt Drudge. But it was left-oozing Ebert who made a star of Michael Moore, and Ebert who has encouraged Politically Correct filmmaking and become what frontpagemagazine.com writer Chris Reed dubbed the left’s “Shrill Shill” in cinema.

"You can hardly say anything about minorities now," Scorsese complained of Ebert-esque Political Correctness to The Times. "It has made it extremely difficult to open your mouth."

The high point of host Chris Rock’s evening came when, on videotape, he interviewed African-American moviegoers who, it turned out, had seen none of that year’s Academy-nominated Best Pictures. (Rock had joked that no heterosexual black men watch the Academy Awards...and apparently did these interviews to show why.) It was a wonderful pricking of Hollywood's inflated sense of self-importance and virtually guarantees that Rock will never again be invited to host the Academy Awards....unless another limp movie season requires it.