Introducing the Guilties!

Which best picture nomination is the best example of Oscar trying to ram its liberal guilt down our throats?

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Crash, Movies, Arts & Entertainment

David Strathairn in "Good Night, and Good Luck" and Thandie Newton and Matt Dillon in "Crash"

Feb. 27, 2006 | So, ladies and germs, it's time for the big award. We've listened to a faintly hip and vaguely political TV host crack wise about our president, the one hardly anybody in this room voted for. We've seen cheesy musical numbers, at a level of bogosity that has made us ache for the craftsmanship and aesthetic integrity of "American Idol." We've gasped with horror at the atrocious and expensive gowns, and listened as millionaires tearfully thanked their accountants, their nannies and their second-grade teachers back in Chillicothe.

Can I have the envelope, please? I may slit it open gracefully, or rip it apart manfully, like an eager lover busting the strap of some Victoria's Secret undergarment. I'll make that decision on impulse. Let's get a drum roll. Let's flicker the lights meaningfully. OK. Now. And the winner is ...

No, silly, these aren't the Oscars. These are the LGAs -- you know, the Liberal Guilt Awards, otherwise known as the Guilties, in which Hollywood congratulates itself for its general condition of progressive enlightenment and lectures the rest of us from its newfound position of half-baked moral seriousness. Now, strange to tell, this year's nominated films are exactly the same for both the Academy Awards and the LGAs. You could argue, in fact, that as Hollywood has pulled a long face in the last year and cranked out one feel-bad soapbox flick after another, the Oscars have pretty much become a liberal-guilt-apalooza.

OK, so the LGAs don't really exist. But we decided they should, at least this time around. In a year when America shuffled along under a president nobody likes (or at least nobody in Hollywood), trapped in an endless and dreary war nobody likes (ditto, although I'm not sure anybody else is too crazy about it either), it seemed like the way to get an awards nomination was to deliver a sober, bordering-on-soporific movie that tackled Meaningful Social Issues while beautiful people stared into each other's eyes over an ululating, quasi-ethnic soundtrack.

Admittedly that description also applies to those lovingly produced commercials for mysterious pharmaceuticals that dominate late-night television. But this is nonetheless the year in which Oscar-nominated films have been attacked for being too soft on homosexuals, Arab terrorists, black street criminals and communists. (So far as I know, nobody has accused "Good Night, and Good Luck" of going too easy on Joe McCarthy.) Conversely, I'm sure somebody somewhere feels that some of those movies were too tough on those categories of people. (I can guarantee that Ann Coulter and her band of blood-drinking cyborgs see "Good Night" as a slur against St. Joe's name.)

In search of the picture most deserving of a Guilty -- for most egregious achievement in pompous, self-important message delivery -- I came at the best picture nominees relatively fresh. I had seen only one of them before taking on this assignment, and since I mostly cover low-budget independent film, watching these lush, expensive, manipulative productions one after the other was something like eating birthday cake for dinner for a week.

At the same time, I'll admit that I'm not altogether unhappy about Hollywood's latest bout of compulsive seriousness (even if making fun of it is irresistible). In general, I prefer the mainstream movie world in its soul-searching mode than in its fun-loving and/or life-celebrating mode. Mostly that's a question of craft, not morality: All the nominated films this year are well made and packaged with earnest attentiveness, and generally adopt the notion that mainstream audiences might possess brains and be willing to deal with some level of moral ambiguity. For various reasons, most of them bad, audiences for romances, comedies and action films are generally assumed to be morons who require regular doses of electrification to keep them awake.

All these movies have previously been reviewed on Salon, and admirably so, by my colleague and pal Stephanie Zacharek. Our opinions coincide in some cases and differ in others, but I didn't try to rereview these movies so much as unpack the message they're delivering and the politics, if any, they come wrapped in. When it comes to handing out the Guilty -- a semi-abstract sculpture representing the unity of all peoples and an end to hunger and warfare, or perhaps just representing Angelina Jolie (which comes to the same thing in the end) -- the choice was absolutely clear.

So. Let's back up a little. The nominees are 

Next page: Separating the contenders from the pretenders