Maybe this all sounds like cultural elitism. It would be entirely unintelligible to them - not the film itself (but that would be unintelligible too), but that anyone else would dare to want to see a film like Persona. The reason I bring up Persona here and now is that it is precisely the last kind of film that would ever win an Oscar®, not because it's not one of the best films of all-time, but because it epitomizes everything that vulgar, knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers associate with 'art cinema': austerity, non-traditional 'narrative,' existential crisis, and ambiguity! ambiguity! ambiguity! Actually, I'm certain there's a large swath of the populace that couldn't even conceive of the fact that a great deal of time, effort, and capital would be invested in the creation of a film like Persona.
It was a real puzzler of an enigma of a riddle named Persona, starring two members of his Brat Pack (Bibi Andersson and, in her first Bergman outing, Liv Ullmann) and dealing with identity in some obtuse (but compelling) way. TENUOUS SEGUE: In the mid-1960s, Swedish director Ingmar Bergman released one of the most emblematic films of his career. Sure, the black guy who makes the noises with his mouth might have some surprising taste, but everything's always canceled out by Steve Guttenberg. We could only blame ourselves for our disappointment if we expected them to come up with Last Year at Marienbad or Celine and Julie Go Boating. In all fairness, we really can't expect much better, can we? It would be as if we took the casts and crews of all the Police Academy movies and asked them to select the best film of the year. Yes, perhaps your selective memory has allowed you to forget that all of the preceding films were nominated for best picture - and the last two actually won - but I never forget, and I never forgive.
I am no enemy of absurdity, triviality, or - my favorite - willful stupidity, but if the elite are summoned by a religious calling to celebrate the best and brightest of the cinematic realm - a sort of star-studded Star Chamber of everybody and anybody who ever went down on Harvey Weinstein - surely they can shake a stick and hit a few better nominees than Airport, Broadcast News, The Blind Side, Working Girl, Ghost, The Prince of Tides, The Towering Inferno, The Sound of Music, and Rocky. That's the kind of stuff they do when they're not giving awards to Braveheart.
(The Academy of Motion Picture 'Arts' and 'Sciences' has begun litigation to prevent me from invoking the name Oscar®. This event is, colloquially, referred to as the Oscars®. Last night, the tanned, shellacked, and post-consumer recycled assembly which, together, is customarily known as the Hollywood establishment/cabal gathered in an auditorium in Los Angeles for the not sole, but primary purpose of contorting its multicellular body into a ceremonial auto-rimjob (of the deep-penetration, non-dental-dammed variety), which was then broadcast to televisions around the world to narcotize the little people with visions of grimacing celebrity death masks and the fascist heel of Jimmy Choo impaling the already wounded souls of Haiti, Chile, and Schaumberg.
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