The Inmates are Running the Asylum

The biggest issue I see with the Oscars and with the last few years of movies and entertainment in general is the huge gap in culture that exists in the Hollywood crowd and the average citizen. In order to be entertained by some medium whether it be music or a movie or a simple work of art there has to be some cultural connection, some identification with some thing or some emotion that the person can relate to.

It’s like going to a foreign film where a really clever dubbing job has been done. The culture, personalities and belief systems of the characters are so foreign that the average viewer can not and doesn’t want to identify with them. There has always been a small group, who love foreign films, I happen to be one of those people. But… The main stream just doesn’t get it and it isn’t willing to go to the trouble of paying attention enough to get it when they can’t speak the language of the film. They may have been speaking English in Broke Back Mountain, Syriana and Crash but it was from a perspective that most people just don’t get.

Look at these movies. Crash was actually a pretty good movie. If you dropped 150 of the 182 expletives I would have agreed with the award in part. Syriana was full of gratuitous violence and the cast didn’t need it to support the plot line. George Clooney can carry off any part; he doesn’t need all the gore to make a hit. Broke Back Mountain was a movie that portrays and was marketed to about 10 to 12 percent of the population. The problem with the movie was not that the leads were gay. The problem with the movie is that it was about the fact that they were gay. There have been many wonderful movies with gay characters and gay leads that were in a movie about something happening. Philadelphia comes to mind as a striking example of a movie where the leading man and his lover were gay but there was a human drama going on around them that was the theme of the movie. People could identify with that.

The image I keep getting of Hollywood is a group of people standing around drooling and pissing on themselves while more drooling pissing idiots come and pat them on the back for drooling and pissing. Then our dutiful media just keeps patting those congratulatory idiots and pondering why the rest of us just don’t care.

The inmates are truly running the asylum.

Tonyh