Have They No Shame?

By Nikki Finke, LA Weekly. Posted January 27, 2005.

We've come to expect year-round insane decisions from those studio lunatics, like the fact that sources tell me Warner's at first refused to fund what became its best hope in eons for a Best Picture Oscar. But it's that loathsome time of year again when the inmates take over the asylum, so we're stuck ranting against our own Hollywood lunatics who came out with this week's sanity-defying Oscar nominations. So before we get to my projected winners, I have to ask: What the hell is wrong with you people?

Eleven nominations for a mess of a movie like The Aviator and a monster of a man like Harvey Weinstein is just incomprehensible, as is the snubbing of The Motorcycle Diaries, Fahrenheit 9/11, and even The Passion of the Christ. You hypocrites pretend that the Academy Awards honor motion-picture artistry, while always keeping an eye on popularity to stay in step with Main Street. Yet you overlook the year's three most talked-about movies that had the vision thing. And don't even try to argue that daring subject matter like humanizing commie icon Che Guevara or turning Dubya into a war criminal and Jews into the killers of Christ was too hot to handle, when you were willing to praise films about abortion (Vera Drake), euthanasia (Million Dollar Baby, The Sea Within), genocide (Hotel Rwanda), drug addiction (Ray), paranoia (The Aviator), pedophilia (Finding Neverland) and wild, monkey sex (Sideways).

That said, it's not just that passing on Passion (only three nominations, and only in the non-marquee categories of Art Direction, Makeup and Original Score) flew in the face of everything the Academy is supposed to reward. No other movie this year, rightly or wrongly, was as risky an endeavor, even if it did pay off. (Talk about arty. Much of the movie was made in the Aramaic and Latin languages, with few subtitles. Remember when Dances With Wolves won Best Picture because of its use of Sioux Lakota dialect?) Irony of ironies, because of its prejudice against Passion, Hollywood will have in its arsenal even less ammunition to fend off those anti-Semitic bigots complaining how America's entertainment industry is controlled and contaminated by "The Jews."

As for Weinstein, he appears to have been the beneficiary of an Oscar pity party after getting kicked to the curb by Disney. But I predict Harv's humiliations are only just beginning. (And I'm not only talking about the inevitable lawsuit with Disney over any realistic valuation of Miramax.) Recent history has shown that, while Weinstein can certainly score an Academy nomination, he can't steal the awards anymore. His movies, such as The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Cider House Rules, In the Bedroom and Cold Mountain, have come up virtually empty on Oscar night. I predict that same fate awaits The Aviator this time around. As for Harvey, he may have to rethink his moviemaking formula, which depends heavily on his amply demonstrated ability to sweet-talk talent into working for him for bupkis in exchange for Academy gold. Here's hoping the stupid stars wise up.

Meanwhile, Marty Scorsese deserves this year's Dumb and Dumber award, and I don't mean Best Director. You'd think he would have learned his lesson in 2003 when Gangs of New York was nominated, and he and Harvey were bitch-slapped by the Academy for not only dragging poor old Robert Wise into their over-the-top Oscar politicking, but then deceiving voters by having a Miramax publicist ghost-write a praiseful column on Scorsese that appeared under the beloved wrinkly's byline. (Kudos to John Horn of the Los Angeles Times for busting them on it.) Now, all of a sudden, Robert De Niro is talking publicly that Taxi Driver 2 is in the works with Scorsese. Sources tell me that Raging Bull 2 is also being considered, and that Harvey is going to eventually join Bobby and Marty in this sick joke, along with financier Graham King. (For the record, a Miramax mouthpiece played coy about Weinstein's involvement.)

I'm told this sequel mania is intended to remind Academy voters of all the great movies in Scorsese's body of work. But I think it will have an unintended effect: to remind Academy voters what disgusting moneygrubbers both De Niro and Scorsese have become in recent years, culminating in their even thinking about revisiting two great classic American films just to score a coupla bucks. It's Francis Ford Coppola all over again, and look what happened to him after the critical and commercial failure of Godfather 3. In Scorsese's case, this kind of overreaching is committing Oscar suicide.

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