Don’t mind the frightening wolves howling outside your door. Just be happy you have a door, even if it’s just a flap on your cardboard shack. The world’s imploding and we’re all hobos now. Even Steven Spielberg has gone panhandling — please Mr. Movie Studio Head-honcho spare some change for my Lincoln bio-pic. Yet, ignore it all. After all, we have hope. And during Sunday’s Annual Circle Jerk Celebration of All that is Phony (A.K.A. The Academy Awards), Hollywood didn’t let you forget it. It gave you Wolverine announcing the return of the worries-be-damned-it’s-all-about-the-glam musical, and then capped the night by handing all the gold to you-just-gotta-have-hope Slumdog Millionaire. I was disappointed President Obama didn’t present the award for Best (and Most Hopeful) Picture.
Yes, welcome to the sunny Age of Obamatainment. This year’s Academy Awards was the launch party for it. Ding-dong the dark cynicism of the last 8 years is dead. It’s passé. Give up the dismal, it’s time to get your hope on — boo-yah! — just like you did during the ’80s when the country grew fatigued of Nixon-era disillusionment, threw a great communicator into the White House to handle a sputtering economy, and demanded that cinema aim more for the bubble-gum profundity of Zapped!
Hollywood got the memo then — quick, toss some statues at Chariots of Fire, it’s inspirational — and they got it now. This year’s best picture nominees all have a hopeful edge to them. Slumdog Millionaire not only retells the rags-to-riches story, but it throws the boy-gets-girl standby in the mix too. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button whimsically tells a love conquers all tale. Milk may have a downer of an ending, but it’s brimming with hope for the evolution of our culture. Frost/Nixon unfolds in the tradition of the old-as-the-Bible, hope-obsessed yarn of David versus Goliath. And even The Reader has a bizarrely hopeful outlook.*
And that thread of optimism is precisely why The Dark Knight didn’t garner any of the major Oscar noms (with the exception of Saint Ledger’s). The film, with its Batman on the lam ending, is too much of a negative ninny to have made this year’s cut. It’s an artifact of the Bush era, in which pessimism ruled. Last year, the Academy Awards tapped out on the bleak vibe by naming a manifesto on nihilism as best picture. No Country for Old Men and its main competition in last year’s race, There Will Be Blood, are films that slam, bolt and weld the hatch shut on optimism. They were the apocalyptic crescendo of the doom-drenched misery encompassing the Bush years.
Dubya was a sad lemon of a president, a smug golem who churned out one tragic decision after another like he had a quota to meet… I already miss him. We’ve lost our bogeyman of a muse. Say what you will about the string of travesties carried out by the carnival geek show that was the Bush administration, but give credit when due: Bush provoked the arts and entertainment industry to step it up over the last 8 years. If art is the expression of reaction, then just about everyone with a pen, camera, or crayon reacted to the daily horror show of the Bush era. We have George W. Bush, the villain**, to thank for nearly a decade’s worth of enraged, brilliant satire, comedy, allegory and drama across the spectrum of arts.
Entertainers and artists discussed with outraged zeal the absurd, dark regions of the loathsome America character Bush represented. Whether it was Jon Stewart mocking Bush nightly or nearly every documentary filmmaker in the universe tackling the disastrous consequences of his administration’s policy, dissent in the arts thrived over the last 8 years — contrary to the myth that Bush and his cronies had quashed all protest.
Blockbusters depicting a sense of world-awareness veiled by aliens blowing shit up met with varying results. But you couldn’t help but smile even at the failures. At the very least, Hollywood was trying to be interesting and subversive in its own mainstream way. And when films weren’t intentionally drawing connections to the world according to Bush, they were capturing the national zeitgeist of despondency. Movies were unafraid to go dark. In fact, we wanted films to explore the shadows — culminating in the success of The Dark Knight.
But ahh, how just half a year and a leader with a sanguine vision can change the national mood. We know the world still stinks. But move on. It’s time to buck up. Get cheery. It may still be hailing outside, but Obama has given us an umbrella and rose-tinted binoculars. It’s only a short matter of time before that attitude fully imbues itself within our arts and entertainment. This year’s Oscars shot the opening salvo.
* Unfortunately it’s a horribly twisted outlook that conveys an unintentional hopeful message for Holocaust deniers and Nazi sympathizers. Don’t play the indignant card. It’s a perfectly legit criticism against this messy, incoherent film.
** And just as Jason Voorhees — a silly relic of the ’80s — replaced the villainous phantom of Richard Nixon in ’70s cinema, is it any surprise he circled back to take over for George W. Bush?
*** While Hollywood could turn out serious films related to the Bush administration’s decisions (A.K.A. Iraq War movies), it couldn’t market them worth a shit, which I think played more into their poor box-office than a cultural indifference toward them.
