The 14 percent ratings plunge for this year’s Academy Awards was a bit of a surprise. I thought it would be a lot lower. The national grumbling in living rooms Sunday night grew into a national disgust at water coolers on Monday morning. The vote was in. We need a break form short French films about pickpockets and long American films about murderous psychotics.

Let’s start with the self indulgent Coen bothers, who cheated the audience out of an ending just because they can. You see, they’re the famous Coen brothers who built up enough legitimate credit with quality films that now they can pull the rug out from under an audience and get away with it. The Coen’s, like a lot of filmmakers, look down on us at the same they court us. And thus, they resent us for not rewarding them every time out. It irks them to have to cater to our tastes. They’re so above us. The only people they care about impressing are their peers. And in Hollywood the new way to impress your peers is to portray America, especially Texas, as a sewer. It’s not a coincidence that “There Will Be Blood” also took place in Texas.

The trend extends to movie reviewing as well. The new way to review a movie is to judge it on how well it was made to the exclusion of how entertaining it was. Again, more peer concern than audience concern. And it saddens and infuriates this lover of the great American art form.

The valueless movie movement reared its ugly head with last year’s winner, “The Departed,” the film that finally won an Oscar for Martin Scorsese, even though it wasn’t nearly as good as some of his previous work, including “Goodfellas” or “Casino.” I can just hear the pitch for “The Departed” – Wouldn’t it be cool if the cops had a mole (called “rat” in this film) in the mob, and the mob had a rat in the police department? So they went about building a story around this premise. But to make it even “cooler” they portrayed the police and the mob as morally equivalent. Everybody is a rat. And in case anyone missed the point, Scorsese, of all people, lowered himself by using the last scene in the movie to show an actual rat crawling across a railing. Since that kind of shameless symbolism is laughed out of film school, the great Martin Scorsese must have really felt he needed to make the rat point. I remember whispering to my date in the theater, “OK, Marty. We get it.” Don’t worry. I don’t talk in movies. I revere them too much, or at least I used to. I rarely succumb to the temptation to say anything, but if I do I very discretely whisper directly into the ear next to me so as not to disturb anyone.

Tony Gilroy, who directed “Michael Clayton,” claimed in the LA Times on Monday that his personal anger over the war in Iraq has contributed to his movie violence. Not noticing the irony, Patrick Goldstein of the Times added that fear of terrorism and other recent events outside the industry are contributing causes for the wave of dark and violent films. So here we have members of the same entertainment industry that started the culture coarsening with hundreds of f-bombs in a single movie and showing Jerry Springer as after school faire (both long before 911 and the war in Iraq) blaming other people and other events for the darkness in their own hearts. And if they’re being honest that other events can actually cause them to create repulsive films it’s even more disturbing.

A final note for all those who don’t know what happened at the non-ending of “No Country for Old Men,” don’t feel alone. And don’t be embarrassed to say so. Nobody understands it. Just check out the blogs to see how confused the rest of the country is. And for your pretentious friends who don’t want to admit that they don’t understand it for fear of appearing unsophisticated, just ask them to explain it to you. They’ll fumble all over the place and finally admit they don’t know either. I never thought I’d say this about a film that won the Oscar for best picture, but unless you want to feel taken in, don’t rent this movie. Maybe they’ll get the message.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Archive, Oscars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.