Sunday, March 7, 2010

The Academy Awards

It turns out this is Oscar Night and I haven't seen a thing.

Precious, Inglorious Basterds, and Hurt Locker sound offensive. And I have a vague dislike for James Cameron even though I know nothing about him. The word among Hollywood folk is that nobody likes him. Members of the Academy would have a hard time voting to hand him an Oscar.

Let me see. What else.

Oh, yeah. I would probably tend to side with Ishmael Reed in his attacks on Precious. I haven't seen it, so I won't argue the point.

Here's a link to his latest comments about it on counterpunch.com:

http://www.counterpunch.com/reed03052010.html

...On Tuesday, when I debated Cameron Bailey, the African American co-director of the Toronto Film Festival, who brought the film to Canada, the NAACP awards were the first thing that he brought up. He also followed the sales pitch directed by Lionsgate that the critics of the film were either odd or mentally ill, as a way of minimizing the widespread discontent about this film among black Americans. The sales office has singled out Armond White as the lone critic opposing the film, and seeks to dismiss him as a “contrarian,” a trend begun by the New YorkTimes’ critic A.O. Scott, for whom the family in “Precious” was the typical impoverished black family. Bailey used the same word to criticize White.

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