TruthNews Commentary, March 6, 2006

What do these ten movies have in common?

• "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith"
  
• "The Chronicles of Narnia - The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe"
  
• "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"
  
• "War of the Worlds"
  
• "King Kong"
  
• "Wedding Crashers"
  
• "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"
  
• "Batman Begins"
  
• "Madagascar"
  
• "Mr. & Mrs. Smith"

• They were the highest grossing movies of 2005

• None of them was nominated for an Academy Award

• "Brokeback (sic) Mountain" -- Ang Lee's story about a gay British cowboy, or gay British actor playing a cowboy, or a British actor playing a gay cowboy, or something like that. Apparently, the academy felt guilty about ignoring Lee's 2003 box office hit "The Hulk," so they threw him a bone with this one.

• "Munich" -- Steven Spielberg's movie about how Britain and France tried to appease the Nazis by agreeing to let Hitler take over Czechoslovakia, leading to the carnage of World War II and the murder of 6 million Jews. No wait, wrong Munich. This is Steven Spielberg's movie about how the Israeli Mossad took vengeance on the innocent Palestinian terrorists who murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

• "Capote" -- a movie about some dead white male author I've never heard of. Being that he's a dead white male, he wasn't part of the curricula. But now Hollywood has discovered Capote was gay, so they made a movie about him.

• "Goodnight and Good Luck" -- George Clooney's tale about Hollywood's blacklisting of communists in the 1950s.

• "Crash" -- A movie about racism in Los Angles.

There was a time when Hollywood gave Oscars to films that people actually went to see. "The Sound of Music," "Patton," "The Godfather," and "Rocky" all won the Academy Award for Best Picture. But recently, Hollywood seems bent on giving awards only to artistic films with serious topics. An exception to this was two years ago when the award went to Peter Jackson's third "Lord of the Ring" films, but that was only because they'd ignored the first two. This year, the Academy ignored Jackson's "King Kong." If Jackson made two more King Kong films, the Academy might be forced to recognize the third (working title: "The Return of the King"), but there's a problem with this, specifically,

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow:

the big ape gets it at the end, making it difficult to have a sequel.

If the Best Picture nominations weren't obscure enough, the award for Best Actor went to Philip Seymour Hoffman. "Philip who?" you ask. Other recent winners of this award have included Adrien Brody, Roberto Benigni, Geoffrey Rush, and Jeremy Irons, none whom are exactly box office stars. The only one of these actors I've ever heard of is Adrien Brody. That's because he was in "King Kong." When I saw "King Kong," I asked, "Who is that guy? I've never heard of him." Imagine my surprise when I learned that he won a Best Actor award in 2002 for the film "The Pianist," directed by fugitive child molester Roman Polanski.

If the Academy Awards continue giving the Oscars to obscure films and actors, the annual telecast will become about as obscure as the Tony Awards, in which people that no one has ever heard of get awards for plays that no one has ever heard of. But there's one consolation. If the networks drop the Oscars for low ratings, the Academy Awards can always do like the Miss America Pageant and move to Country Music Television. An awards program honoring films about gay cowboys, gay writers, and communists infiltrating Hollywood should go over big with the country music fans.