Oscar's left eye is blind

By Gabriel Garnica

With the Academy Awards just around the corner, we are reminded that this annual event has been a vivid display of more than merely Hollywood's yearly film offerings; it has also been a clear reminder of Tinseltown's liberal bias. Between bashing The Passion of The Christ as anti-semitic while managing to honor Leni Riefenstahl, whose Nazi filmmaking has often been described as a love letter to the government and society that murdered millions of Jews, Hollywood has managed to look about as foolishly biased and selective as anything Michael Moore could ever conjure up.

This year has not disappointed those seeking further examples of such absurd bias and hypocrisy. As has already been widely reported, the Academy failed to nominate Waiting for Superman, which has been hailed as fine filmmaking, because it dared to shed light on our failing public school system and the role of teachers' unions in that failure. The most deliciously ironic part of that snub itself is the fact that Superman's Oscar winning filmmaker, Davis Guggenheim, was embraced by this same Hollywood when he served up Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. What Guggenheim and others need to keep in mind is that Hollywood is nothing but a liberal propaganda machine which happily churns out anything that bashes the Right, Christianity, the Pro-Life movement, traditional family life, and basically anything that the Democratic Party would reject showing at a fundraiser. Meanwhile, if a film glorifies the propaganda and agenda that the Left favors, it is given iconic status, remembered with fondness, or least given the time of day.

Now we are told by The Associated Press how the natural gas industry tried to prevent the documentary Gasland, criticized by the gas industry as being inaccurate propaganda, from being considered for an Oscar. The liberal media presents this story as just another example of attempted censorship by the Right and its greedy cronies. Energy in Depth spokesman Chris Tucker has stated that his group had no expectations that the documentary would actually be disqualified from Oscar consideration, but it did want to educate academy voters.

Gasland's director, Josh Fox, tells us that this tactic has backfired, and that this effort to bash his film has only served to draw more attention to the issue. Fox adds "But I think it shows how aggressive they are, how bullying they are, and how willing they are to lie to promote the falsehood that it's OK to live in a gas drilling area." He adds that "The point was to get the film to the people who needed it most, who were in the middle of making those decisions" on whether to lease their land for drilling.

In response to this controversy, Bruce Davis, the academy's executive director, has written that if the academy were to act on every complaint about a nominated film, there could be no documentary category, and that the academy must " trust the intelligence of our members" to sort out fact from fiction. Davis added that "if facts have been suppressed or distorted, if truth has been twisted, we depend on them to sniff that out and vote accordingly."

Viewed in the context of its justifications for nominating Gasland, the academy's snub of Waiting comes off looking even more biased, selective, and hypocritical. Had Waiting been roundly and consistently criticized as poor filmmaking, there would be no issue. However, it has been widely hailed as powerful, enlightening, and informative as well as emotional. Apparently, the liberal Hollywood elite believe that it is more critical to enlighten people who might be affected by gas drilling than people who might be affected by ineffective and corrupt public education. Liberals have no problem labeling gas companies as greedy, deceptive bullies but seem to have a major problem portraying teachers' unions in a similar light. Despite report after report citing how such unions protect ineffective teachers over our children, seem more intent on wasting funds than spending wisely and, above all, take every opportunity to bully their agenda and protect their stranglehold on American public education to the detriment of parents and students, the Left knows where its bread is buttered, and that butter is teachers' union brand.

This year's Oscars will once again present the tales Hollywood has spun this year, fact or fiction, but mostly propaganda. These awards will again honor those films Hollywood deems acceptable to its agenda and ignore the offerings the entertainment industry has declared unacceptable. The more one thinks about it, an Oscar win by Gasland would be the most fitting result for Hollywood's yearly display of hypocrisy since, more often than not, the entire event is nothing but a stylized litany of hot air.

© Gabriel Garnica