So many deserving, yet-to-be acknowledged men and women who actually work in and contribute to the film business, and here goes the Academy making a choice that’s quite obviously geared toward television ratings as opposed to merit:

Hollywood Wiretap:

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has selected actor James Earl Jones and makeup artist Dick Smith as recipients of this year’s Honorary Awards. And, in something of a head-scratcher, Oprah Winfrey will be honored with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

The Academy’s board of governors voted on the awards on Tuesday night. They will be conferred at the 3rd Annual Governors Awards on Nov. 12 at the Grand Ballroom at the Hollywood & Highland Center.

Winfrey, best known for her TV contributions, received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress for her film debut in 1985’s “The Color Purple.” The Hersholt prize goes to someone “whose humanitarian efforts have brought credit to the industry.”

Deadline Hollywood Daily:

Suffice it to say that of all the lousy decisions made by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and its Board of Governors, choosing Oprah Winfrey to receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award has to rank among the worst. This Oscar statuette is supposed to be given “to an individual in the motion picture industry whose humanitarian efforts have brought credit to the industry”. …

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So an entertaining film comes out about a woman who bucks up against societal norms in the early seventies, puts career over family, and still comes out a winner — sounds like someone’s flirting with Oscar! Strangely, it doesn’t earn a single nomination.

“Secretariat,” a movie about the horse who won more awards than Al Gore, will not be in the starting gate at the Oscars, February 27. What could be the problem? It opened the weekend after the “Social Network,” so it wasn’t like the Academy of ADHD Artists had time to forget about it. It wasn’t that it didn’t have a good enough campaign team working behind it either. Disney pitched it right alongside “Toy Story 3,” a long-shot which actually made it into the Best Picture category, a rare occurrence for a cartoon.

Diane Lane put in an undeniably Oscar-worthy performance that recalls some of the most glamorous actresses of a Hollywood’s golden age. She played Secretariat’s owner, Penny Tweedy, with the poise of Grace Kelly, the brash of Katherine Hepburn, and the warmth of Donna Reid. John Malkovich should have been a shoe-in, with one of his quirkiest characters to date, as the trainer Lucien Laurin; a role that recalled some of the greater comedic sidekicks from the heyday of Disney like Don Knotts, Tim Conway, and Buddy Hackett

Perhaps the PG rating made it into a film that no one in the Academy bothered to watch. After “The Blind Side” took two nominations last year, the members of the Academy became aware of the disturbing trend of solidly entertaining family pictures that are uplifting and not vulgar. Perhaps a few more jokes about cleaning out the stables could have won a PG-13 rating and a couple seats in the Kodak Theater. (more…)

The Oscar-nominated movies in recent years have been enough to make a grown man cry… Or worse. Consider “There Will Be Blood,” “No Country for Old Men” and “The Reader” as a sampling of the morbid films jockeying for Oscar glory. This year, add Oscar wannabes “The Road” and “Precious” to the list.

Newsweek scribe Ramin Setoodeh writes about the trend in the liberal magazine’s latest edition. Setoodeh bemoans the fact that some of the best films lately take a too sober view of society. On that we can agree.

Then, Setoodeh whips out his trusty Bush bashing cudgel and starts a whacking:

You can blame Hollywood’s doom and gloom on the Oscars, but I’m not going to. Instead, I think it’s George W. Bush’s fault. Most liberal directors felt restless under his presidency, and they pushed the envelope with over-the-top, operatic tragedies. (more…)

If the evil men do lives after them, the legacy of dishonesty, demagoguery and hypocrisy that Michael Moore has been enabled to legitimize in film and the body politic will endure for a long time after he quits making documentaries as he says he may. That hopefully means his disingenuous indictment of capitalism now making him millions in theaters will be the last time he’ll project his puerile class warfare demons onto a movie screen and insult our intelligence by calling it a documentary.

Don’t get me wrong. Moore came up with a clever shtick that can be amusing, but he doesn’t make real documentaries. He makes sophomoric  agitprop that violates the Oscar’s rule against fiction in that form which other documentary makers must apparently follow — a double standard point I’ve made to the Academy awarders twice. Only the first of those letters is listed below because of space limitations, but a key point made in that second note is that there should be a separate category for Moore’s type of fabricated political schlock if such stuff is going to be receiving awards .  Sans that, “anything goes with documentary film … there are no standards … it’s all a game,” as University of Texas film professor and indie producer John Pierson put it. (more…)

Boy, did I ever kick a hornet’s nest with my tongue-in-cheek Archie Bunker-on-steroids BH post, “My Secret Life as a Conservative Republican.” Lefties called it Reaffirmation With Senator Smalley, which I expected. But Righties nearly wet their pants in fear, which I did not expect in the least. Where’s the pioneering spirit, self-confidence and gutter-level humor that founded this country?

People, this is OUR Fortress Hollywood! This is OUR sanctuary! Since when the hell do we care about what demagogues like Keith Olbermann think or say? Or any other mental tinfoil hat Lefties like Garofalo for that matter? It’s like Churchill worrying about Hitler calling him a fat cigar-chomping drunk! Who won that fight, and why? And who was in the right, despite all the insipid name-calling?

Time to grow a pair, people. It’s also time to raise the stakes. Now, I’ve heard from some contributors here at BH that it is really bad in Hollywood in places. That people might even lose their jobs if they spoke up like I do here. If true, that’s McCarthyism at its worst. Fortunately, that’s not my experience. I still have great relationships with people in the biz who could care less about politics. All they care about is finding great scripts or literary works to adapt, and telling great stories on film.

And that is where the battle really needs to be fought: on their playing ground. An insurgency of ideas, if you will. Example. Just under the Big Hollywood sign today, I saw the banner “TNT’s ‘The Closer’ Thrives on Strong Moral Foundation.” That PJM-linked article describes how The Closer, a show that portrays the border, the illegals situation, and even the cops themselves in very gritty and realistic fashion, is the top-rated scripted show on ad-supported cable since its inception. (more…)

I see a great story in Roxana Saberi. Don’t you? A can’t fail, high-concept, four-quadrant script with a unique storyline. In fact, I’d expect a bidding war no less severe and cutthroat for the rights to Roxana’s story as that for Lone Survivor. You know. A MARIE in Iran meets MISSING kinda thing.

A young and beautiful former Miss North Dakota and reporter for the BBC and NPR, among others, falsely arrested by misogynist Iran and tagged with a series of escalating charges, from buying wine to reporting with expired credentials to espionage, charges even Roxana’s lawyer has not officially seen to date, but upon which Ms. Saberi was just sentenced to eight years in the Iranian Hell of Evin prison in a one-day kangaroo court trial. Coercion was also involved, including a threat to kill her.

Any questions as to who and what we’re really dealing with here now? (more…)

Some interesting news on Team Oscar in Iran. It seems both Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (he of the murdered blogger and post-Obama video Death to America rallies) and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are actually using Team Oscar’s visit to Iran as hard-line ideological weapons against their “soft” political opponents in upcoming elections.

In the Iranian Daily Kayhan, Ali Khamenei’s own personal Islamist rag, the Supreme Asswipe in his March 2nd Op-ed titled “What Are the Producers of Anti-Iranian Films Doing Here?” called Team Oscar, “the planners and heads of a new Hollywood project against Iranian national security.” (more…)