Taking aim at the best and worst of movies and television.
On the one hand, there is The Blind Side, John Lee Hancock's feel-good drama about a white woman (Sandra Bullock) who welcomes a homeless black teenager (Quinton Aaron) into her home and helps guide him toward success on the football field. Embraced by many as an uplifting tale of human goodness, the movie is also an infuriatingly naïve vision: It condescendingly suggests that the only way for black people to escape the ghetto is with the help of well-to-do whites.
On the other hand, there is Precious, Lee Daniels' harrowing drama about life in Harlem, circa the mid-1980s. The title character is obese, illiterate and prone to stealing buckets of fried chicken. Her mother is the very definition of the "welfare queen." The movie luxuriates in stereotypes to make a larger, more complex point: In Daniels' portrayal, Precious and her mother have spent so long internalizing the racist clichés of society that they've become those clichés.
That both of these films are competing for the Best Picture prize feels perfectly appropriate for our times: We like to pretend as if racial tensions and anxieties are part of the past, even as those tensions and anxieties proliferate all around us.
It's a division that plays out again and again among this year's Oscar nominees. Four years after the blunt race-relations melodrama Crash beat out the subtly political gay romance Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture, it's almost as if we've seen Hollywood splinter in two opposite directions in addressing questions of race, politics, faith and human rights.
In District 9, a group of aliens living in South Africa are driven from their homes by government officials; it's an excruciatingly literal allegory for how whites have treated minorities, and how immigration is handled by Western democracies.
In Avatar, a noble white soldier (Sam Worthington) journeys to a foreign planet with the purpose of taming a group of native savages. The story that unfolds -- this white man is seduced by the "pure" ways of the alien people and eventually yearns to becomes one of them -- is a juvenile and dopey replay of the Dances With Wolves, "native man good, white man bad" myth.
But just when you want to throw your hands up in dismay and bemoan the fact that such simple-minded treatments of race were also box-office behemoths, you look at the rest of the Best Picture nominees, and discover a handful of movies as prickly, brave and upsetting as Avatar and The Blind Side are coddling and comforting.
In addition to Precious, there was Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, a revisionist fantasy about a group of Jewish-American soldiers who slaughter Nazis and eventually bring down the entire Third Reich. The movie is a furious rebuke to every World War II movie ever made, not to mention the movie Steven Spielberg's Munich desperately wanted to be -- a celebration of Jewish power that portrays its characters as active heroes instead of passive victims.
There was also Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man, a movie steeped in Jewish theology and mysticism in which the filmmakers -- à la early fiction of Philip Roth -- seem to be working through their own anger and frustration with Judaism.
It probably goes without saying that in a popular culture ruled by political talk-show loudmouths, such intriguing and subtle films were widely misinterpreted. Writing in The Occidental Quarterly Online, Trevor Lynch called Inglourious Basterds "probably the most anti-Semitic movie ever released by Hollywood. Tarantino's Jewish characters are one-dimensional, inhuman monsters. The Jewish Basterds are all as ugly as Der Stürmer cartoons." A number of similar reviews never reckoned with the possibility that Tarantino was deliberately exploiting these stereotypes in order to audaciously explode them.
Much the same reaction greeted A Serious Man. On the Web site for The New Republic, one commentator asked, "What to make of a movie in which almost every person resembles an anti-Semitic caricature, complete with hunched shoulders, leg braces and 'sebaceous cysts'?" Such vitriol hardly compared with some of the bombs launched at Precious, mostly notably from Armond White in the New York Press, who called the film "a post-hip-hop freak show ... [that offers] racist hysteria masquerading as social sensitivity."
I suppose that one could find all of this very depressing: Filmmakers like the Coen brothers, Lee Daniels and Quentin Tarantino are conjuring up works that feel deeply attuned to an Obama-era notion of "post-race" -- an age where race is everything and nothing; where race is the subtext of all our discussions and the thing that we can't ever seem to confront. Yet these movies are being judged by the standards of an earlier, more politically correct time, when portrayals of race that didn't hew to "positive" standards were widely derided.
And whereas Tarantino and Daniels, especially, have been asked to defend their efforts, the makers of Avatar, District 9 and The Blind Side have all gotten a free pass. These movies make nice-nice and remind us that racism is bad, and as such there can't possibly be anything wrong with them.
Don't be depressed. For one thing, I have a feeling that time will eventually come down on the side of the more complex titles. Earlier this week, a Los Angeles Times blog post reported on the enthusiastic reaction to Inglourious Basterds from a number of California rabbis, who interpret the film as a retelling of the Purim tale. Precious earned six trophies at last weekend's NAACP Image Awards, suggesting that the majority of the black community, at least, understands exactly what Daniels was trying to achieve with the film.
More to the point, the very fact that Oscar voters have embraced these movies speaks volumes. It's hard to imagine a decade ago that a film about a 300-pound black teenager would be competing for Best Picture, just as it's hard to imagine a movie in which Jewish soldiers gleefully scalp Nazis would have a shot at upsetting the front-runners. You can't write this off to the fact that Oscar now has 10 Best Picture nominees, either. Because while A Serious Man probably wouldn't have made the cut with just five slots, Precious and Inglourious Basterds enjoyed across-the-board support. (Combined they received 14 nominations.)
Sure, it's likely going to be an Avatar victory in the end, just as the victory of Crash a few years back was probably a lot more predictable than any of us realized at the time. But no enduring revolution ever happened overnight. If Oscar keeps inviting more and more troublemakers to the party, pretty soon the more conservative-minded movies will be the minority. And something like Inglourious Basterds, a movie brazenly willing to offend, a movie that infuriates just as many as it entertains, will be declared the winner.
And who knows? Maybe in a few years audiences will tire of the simplistic uplift proffered by something like The Blind Side and realize that the real story of America right now lurks in tough, sometimes contradictory, but vibrantly alive films like Precious. A movie lover can dare to fantasize, right?
