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As the world burns, should we care about the Oscars?

[additional-authors]
January 16, 2015

In recent weeks, the world has been rocked by a series of events that belong in the horror category, as bloody as a Quentin Tarantino movie, but with none of the humor.

By now, there is probably not a soul in the free world who hasn’t heard about the terror attacks that struck France in recent weeks; or of the nearly 2,000 people killed by the terrorist group Boko Haram in Nigeria, the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacre; or of the young Saudi Arabian blogger who was publicly flogged 50 lashes as part of his 10-year jail sentence for insulting Islam. Add to that the daily reports of massively scaled government corruption in Russia, and of human-rights abuses in China, and things seem ever bleaker.

This is the world we live in.

Even if Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker makes a convincing case that human violence has declined substantially in recent decades, that is not the account of the world relayed to us by the international press. Today, to be “informed” also means facing the nonstop prevalence and proliferation of human cruelty and suffering. Judging by the headlines, it is indeed a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

Enter: The Oscars.

Nominations for the 87th annual Academy Awards were announced on Jan. 15, reliably covered by the traditional trade media outlets as well as the nation’s major papers, but after a week of terror and bloodshed they landed with a thud. The annual ceremony in Hollywood inevitably will be a lavish display of the Western world’s most prized excesses — glittering jewels, high-couture fashion, beautiful women on display and parties worthy of Jay Gatsby with alcohol streaming as freely as Netflix and gourmet food fit for the gods (who, I hope, would eat more of it than Hollywood actors).

Set against the backdrop of the “real” world, the Oscars can seem gratuitous (I mean, an entire Oscars industry has emerged around the commodity of a crimson-colored carpet), not to mention seriously out of touch. Hollywood’s distance from the world’s pressing problems seems even more pronounced at a time when the consumers Hollywood depends upon have become more informed and more communicative about what really matters to them than ever before. One of the wonders of modern technology is that it has created a secondary news agenda that has subverted traditional media, which is another way of saying that ordinary people are deciding what news to follow rather than feed on the fodder decided by the press powers that be.

Set against the backdrop of the “real” world, the Oscars can seem gratuitous … not to mention seriously out of touch.

And the gap between terrorism and Tinseltown is sooo wide. This tension is implicit — the show must go on! — as much as it is explicit: The image-driven contrast between the world as it is — millions marching through the streets of Paris — and the fantasy that Hollywood presents — a preening trot down the red carpet digs into my own ambivalence about the Oscars, especially at a time when my heart and mind are preoccupied with thoughts of dead cartoonists and dead Jews.

But to see the Oscars as nothing more than a superfluous fashion spectacle is to sell short one of the most sacred industries in America — and the world. From the outside, sure, the Oscars can seem pretty shallow; but what they represent is as important to a healthy, democratic society as good journalism, and as essential psychologically as a day off from work.  

Rest assured, I’m not going to argue idealistically about Hollywood’s unrelenting commitment to freedom of expression (studio reactions to last year’s Sony hack firmly countermanded that), nor am I going to wax poetic about the power of film to change the world (although, sometimes, it does). But even so, it is still true that Hollywood has the power to magnify the most important voices and stories in our culture and of our time.

Even the highest, Pulitzer Prize-quality journalism can do more to improve the state of things when it is combined with the capacity of Hollywood to reach a global audience. Consider the impact of last year’s Oscar-nominated documentary “The Invisible War,” a study of sexual assault in the U.S. military — and a work of journalism itself — which helped catalyze actual change within a previously unmovable military justice system. Or the 2014 British mini-series “The Honorable Woman,” about a Jewish businesswoman who uses her family’s company to bolster economic progress in the West Bank, and which was not only one of the most entertaining pieces of fiction I’ve seen on screen, but one of the most profound. In fact, there were scenes in this fiction that helped me better understand — and make sense of — the intractable conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. It conveyed the deep, complicated, emotional and psychological charges that drive and fuel the conflict more fully and concretely than any piece of journalism.

Growing up, I remember lying in bed with my mom and watching some awards show as Steven Spielberg accepted an honor for one of his movies, and he said something like, “Motion pictures are the fastest, most effective delivery vehicle for change.” I remember that my mother wrote that down — not for herself, but for me. It was something she wanted to teach me, something she hoped I would learn to value.

What the Oscars celebrate — storytelling, entertainment, escapism, imagination, reflection, drama, humor, beauty, ideals — is something we all sorely need, especially in the aftermath of unfathomable darkness.

The fact that the Oscars even exists is a triumph over the existential and xenophobic forces in the world that tell us life is meaningless, or that the gifts of the afterlife are more tempting than the gifts of living in the world. Hollywood is a lot of things — an industry, an influence (culturally and politically), an actual place, an American dream — but it is also an industry of art. And art is a forum for making meaning and creating beauty out of the times — ruinous or not — we find ourselves living in.

Hollywood offers us respite from a tragic, broken world, and then feeds that world back to us through stories that inform and inspire and invite us to feel. What a treasure that is.

How lucky are we to have both the tumult and flood of the Twitter feed and the treasure house of tales from Hollywood. We need the news and we need “The Newsroom.”

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