So, I watched the Oscars. I was gratified by The Two Towers winning a few technical awards, and pleased that my (admittedly pretty sucky) score of 9 was sufficient to win the prognostication pool between myself, my wife, and my sister-in-law. And it’s fun to see Steve Martin doing what he does. Also, I was curious, like everyone else, to see how the war figured in acceptance speeches.

I basically agree with most of Michael Moore’s criticisms, but his ranting annoyed even me. Personally, I was more impressed with Adrian Brody’s more-thoughtful comments. Michael Moore bugs me in much the same way that Rush Limbaugh and Evan Coyne Maloney do. The strength or weakness of their arguments notwithstanding, I don’t like their certainty. For Michael Moore to get up on the Oscar stage and spout off about Bush’s fictions requires that the other side respond with boos, and the noise level goes up, and before you know it people are willing to go to war with each other in the name of peace.

There’s actually something fairly Bush-like in Moore’s assumption that the direct assault is the way to go. It’s kind of childish; everything is black or white, right or wrong, with us or against us. I assume the author of the YahooNews story I saw about Moore’s acceptance speech was going for irony with the line about how Moore had “used his win of an Oscar to launch a violent attack on US President George W. Bush,” and while I think that phrasing constitutes a pretty severe devaluing of the term “violent attack,” especially in the current context, I can also see the person’s point.

This entry was posted by jbc on Sunday, March 23rd, 2003 at 11:41 pm and is filed under movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.