Academy of the overrated, A&I edition

Scott at Lawyers, Guns, and Money recently wrote an excellent critique of overrated TV shows. I'll throw in my two cents about overrated movies, one in particular. In fact, it's the movie that just won the Academy Award for Best Picture, The Departed.

I'm tired of the pornography of violence in American movies. I'm not talking about the kind that's justified, such as the gut-turning episodes in Saving Private Ryan. After all, people were actually blown to pieces at Omaha Beach, so it only makes sense to depict that carnage in a movie about D-Day.

Instead, I'm talking about the violence that are completely gratuitous, blood-drenched eye-candy for some presumed audience of necrophiles. It's the same audience that, I'm sure, is the target of movies like Sin City and nearly anything John Woo has directed. It's a kind of pornography, in its combination of explicitness and ridiculousness.

It's the sort of violence that made me want to turn off The Departed soon after the movie started. The mafiosi in that movie are so violent that it's amazing any of them have survived through breakfast. Why Martin Scorsese is fascinated with this kind of person--so much so, that he rarely make movies about anything else--is something I'd rather not know. I'll just know better than to watch another movie of his.

What really pisses me off about The Departed winning best picture is the near-complete lack of recognition for far better movies released in 2006. Aside from Flags of Our Fathers, there's Children of Men, a moving fable about the sanctity of life. (Yes, lots of people get killed or injured in this movie. Of course, we feel the kind of revulsion that we should, heightened because humanity has lost the ability to reproduce.)

There's also The Lives of Others, as close to a masterpiece of movie-making as I've seen recently. The Lives of Others is suspenseful and frightening, without ever seeing anyone shot or stabbed.

But, heck, people in Hollywood thought Scorsese was due some belated recognition. Too bad it wasn't for a good movie, in a year when other movies towered over his most recent gangster melodrama. (I've already lost track how many he's made.)

Comments

[Carl]

How about throwing Little Miss Sunshine in the mix, a message movie that didn't beat you on the head and that needs to be heard in today's America.

[J.]

I still haven't forgiven the Academy for giving "Shakespeare in Love" the Best Picture over "Saving Private Ryan." Utter travesty.

My wife and I argue about the Oscar awards all the time. I pick the ones who will win based on politics, she picks the ones who ought to win based on talent. I always win on total correctly named awardees, unfortunately.

[tim]

I agree. As I have gotten older and seen more of life, I am less interested in going to the movies to see some ridiculously over-the top violent flick. Real violence pretty much sucks, and there's plenty of it on CNN. I go to the movies to escape, not to see the same stuff I could see on CNN.

[Tom Grant]

Yeah, a big thumbs up for Little Miss Sunshine. It's one of those comedies that people will be remembering for years. ("I'm the second most prominent Proust scholar in America!")