The Nominees:

“Titanic” – This may mark the only time that I’ve ever completely agreed with that hopeless douche Peter Travers. If memory serves, he called it the best and worst movie of the year. I thought I would hate it and was only half right. Despite the cringe inducing dialogue and laughable, supposedly subtle social commentary, the movie mostly works.

“The Full Monty” – Cute movie, total fluff. Of course, if it hadn’t been nominated, I would probably think more of it. That’s what the Oscars do, they change our perceptions in often crazy ways. On a side note, the phrase “This year’s ‘Pulp Fiction’” was last-used in 1997, only to be replaced in 1998 with “This year’s ‘The Full Monty.’”

“Good Will Hunting” – Man, did this movie experience a backlash! But then its initial groundswell of support was partially generated by the Weinstein hype machine, which put forth the Horatio Alger-esqe lie that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck had come out of nowhere to write and star in this little movie — Weinstein practically begged people to go see it — if you don’t see it, Damon and Affleck will starve! Okay, Harvey never said that. And on the eve of the Oscars, another swirling lie: pssst! Did you hear? William Goldman really wrote it. I still like the movie, if for no other reason than it ushered in a new genre of Boston-set movies with white trash characters. It’s still refreshing to this very day to see white trash characters that aren’t from the South.

“L.A. Confidential” – During Oscar season, the pundits pitched this one as one of those too smart for the room movies. Which couldn’t have been the reason it struggled. After all, I loved it, and I’m not to bright. I mean, too bright.

“As Good As It Gets” – When I saw this, at a sneak preview, I thought, “wow.” James L. Brooks has finally lost it. The Academy, ahem, disagreed. But all the flaws that have plagued his last couple of movies are here in “As Good As It Gets.”

WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN NOMINATED

“Jackie Brown” – It tripled its budget at the box office, but after the enormous success of “Pulp Fiction,” it was viewed as, at best, a disappointment. At worst, a flop. I’ve loved it from the moment it unspooled before my eyes. Great performances from Robert Forster, Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, and Robert De Niro. Funny side note: I saw Tiny Lister not too long ago, and I begged him to bellow, “Yo, I give you his beeper!” I’m pretty sure he wanted to punch me in the throat.

“Boogie Nights” – There are several moments that always get me. Like when Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly) insists people tell him he looks like Han Solo. Or when Todd Parker (Thomas Jane) makes his first appearance, punctuated by the sound of screeching tires. And — oh, yeah! — when Reed and Dirk argue with the guy at the recording studio, so firm in their belief that they are destined for musical stardom.

“The Apostle” - Predictably, studios rejected Robert Duvall’s screenplay about a flawed but dedicated preacher wrestling with his calling and his own redemption. It’s a triumph of capitalism that the independently financed movie stirred a bidding at the Toronto Film Festival. I love how the movie is subtly about one character’s own accepting of Christ, but we don’t even know it until it happens at the end.

“Donnie Brasco” – Al Pacino put his schtick on hold — you KNOW THE ONE, don’t PRETEND. That you DON’T — for Mike Newell’s gangster drama, and the result was his best performance in years. The movie was largely ignored at the Oscars, which was a shame, as the movie holds up better than most of the nominees.

“L.A. Confidential” – Curtis Hanson juggles a lot of characters and a fairly intricate murder mystery in this amazingly photographed story of Los Angeles police corruption in the 1950s. Great performances from a huge cast. Marred by a falsely upbeat ending, it is nevertheless a great movie.

WHAT SHOULD HAVE WON

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights” combines the scope of Altman with the “look-at-me” show-offiness (pretty sure I just made up a word) of Scorsese. He directs this movie like it was the last movie he would ever get to direct, and that energy comes through in every line, every scene, every frame. The actors don’t so much play characters as embody them, from Mark Wahlberg’s sincere, naive, and, um…talented porn star, to Burt Reynolds as the porn auteur who longs to make porn art, but has neither the budget or artistic vision to make it happen.

“Boogie Nights” charts the rise and fall of Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg), who rides the bus every day from Torrence to the porn capital of the world, waiting for his chance to be discovered. Burt Reynolds is Jack Horner (yes, Jack Horner), the director who does indeed discover Eddie, but suggests a new name. Thus, Dirk Diggler is born.

We follow Dirk and his friends —  awkward stereo salesman Buck Swope (Don Cheadle), sound man Scotty J. (Philip Seymour Hoffman at his most actor-y), tragic mother figure Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), and the aforementioned, loyal to the end, Reed Rothchild — through a tumultuous decade of sex, drugs, and bad rock and roll.

The structure is pure “Goodfellas” with pornographers instead of gangsters.

First half = Debauchery is fun. And harmless! I’m jealous.

Mid-Point = Oh, wait. This could go too far. The Line Producer just killed himself. I hate Debauchery! Down with pornographers!

Second half = See? I told you that debauchery and porn and drugs were a bad idea!

Anderson somehow injects a sense of morality into the movie. When the business model shifts from film to videotape, Jack is crestfallen. The new, more accessible format inexorably leads to dirtier dirty movies. And Jack plays along…but he doesn’t seem particularly proud of it. Not that pornography was ever clean, or righteous. But with film it had some level of dignity, which was stripped away the minute the medium became mass produced. That the medium got uglier and more immoral once it hit the internet, sort of proves the movie’s point.

The movie achieves greatness, though, when Dirk, Todd, and Reed visit the home of a whack job dealer named Rahad Jackson (seriously, the names alone in this movie should have qualified it for an Oscar), played by Alfred Molina. As bizarre as the scene is — and it is, most definitely, bizarre — it somehow makes perfect sense that Dirk and his friends would end up in the some dude named Rahad’s living room, while he walks around in a robe and little else, singing along to Night Ranger (on a tape labled “My Awesome Awesome Mix Tape #6.” I mean c’mon), while a little dude we can only assume is his boy-toy wanders around, sullenly lighting firecrackers, and a big, strapped dude weighs the coke Dirk and his friends hope to sell Rahad. Only it’s not coke, it’s baking soda. It’s a long scene, that grows more uncomfortable by the minute.

Rahan puts on “Jesse’s Girl.” And jams to it. And Dirk…just…stares at him. For what feels like five minutes. Twitching, sweating, flinching, itching…he just. Stares. While Reed tries to convince him to leave. In that moment, Dirk realizes what a shambles his life has become, and tries to leave. As dim and shallow as Dirk is, we want him to end up okay. We want him to patch things up with Jack, with whom he’s become estranged.

In the end, it’s a movie about a big, huge, dysfunctional family, and Dirk returns home to his surrogate dad, Jack.

However, President Barack Obama’s latest fundraising report cites an “A-list of Hollywood stars, with donations from some of the top celebrities in the entertainment industry.” Apparently, left-coast liberals want to see to it that the best script reader since Martin Sheen has another shot at practicing lines on set while acting the part of President.

It’s not surprising that Hollywood is smitten with the “Yes We Can” man’s refusal to admit he can’t.  Those in the acting profession are impressed by amateurs like Barry Soetoro (stage name Barack Obama), who has proven to have a professional-level ability to make believe he’s something he is not. Heck, for a season, even Paul Giamatti was convinced he was John Adams.

What could be better for Hollywood than a President who swims around in a policy cesspool similar to the one they refuse to empty in Tinsel Town, overflowing with the squalid water of loose morals, abortion rights, angry feminists, racial indignation, class warfare, and overall elitist hypocrisy?

By and large, actors, comedians and entertainers pride themselves on being pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-free Mumia, pro-promiscuity, and pro-anything non-traditional. Hollywood is full of left-wingers whose “Hope [is to] Change” America into a nation where the likes of Bill Maher and Jane Fonda are symbols of empathy and truth.

The fact that big name stars contribute to Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection bid proves once again that ideological liberals lack intelligence and common sense.  Little do they know that if Obama gets another four years, it’s certain he’ll drive a stake through the heart of the nation that has bestowed fame and fortune on ignorant people who like to play pretend.

It doesn’t take Will Hunting to figure out that people who can’t afford gas and groceries aren’t likely to drop $10 on a movie ticket to watch Julia Roberts fake-giggling while riding on the back of a moped driven by a middle-aged Tom Hanks in a leather jacket.

Yet, despite the inevitable looming catastrophe if Obama is reelected, according to the latest Federal Election Commission report the list of Who’s Who of Obama aficionados includes usual suspects such as Darfur defender George Clooney, Mr. and Mrs. Forrest Gump, and cancer survivor Michael Douglas – a man who would have already succumbed to throat cancer had Obamacare already kicked in.

Campaign contributors also include Schindler’s List director Steven Spielberg and wife Kate Capshaw. The Spielbergs, despite their supposed brilliance, fail to realize they’re supporting a president whose feelings for Israel are at best questionable and whose lack of action could result in the need for another list if an unrestrained Iran eventually has its way.

Another contradictory campaign contributor is newly discovered country singer and proud part-time Londoner, the multifaceted Mrs. Chris “Coldplay” Martin, Gwyneth Paltrow.  Gwyneth likes living in England better than the US, which may be why she decided to punish the colonies by contributing to Obama’s “We Bent the Air Hose in 2008 – Let’s Pull the Plug in 2012” campaign.

Also in the mix is political scene newcomer Jennifer Garner, wife to one of JLo’s many former fiancés, Ben Affleck. When not speaking before Congress on behalf of Save the Children, Garner supports the reelection of a radically pro-choice threat to the lives of millions of unborn children who, thanks to Barack Obama, truly need saving.

Other Obama star contributors include: Monk star Tony Shalhoub, Glee’s Jane Lynch, 24’s president Dennis Haysbert (a man who knows firsthand how to pretend to be a president), and sci-fi star Scott Bakula.  The eclectic group joins cantankerous political wannabe (who should also be in the sci-fi category), 30 Rock actor/über-liberal aspiring NYC mayor Alec Baldwin, who prides himself on being diversified in every area except liberalism.

The July quarterly report for the President’s reelection campaign touts $47 million in donations, while the Democratic National Committee raised $38 million through Obama’s joint committee. According to Barack Obama’s campaign, about 40% of the President’s record-breaking take came from “big-money bundlers” and top Hollywood heavy hitters like Rahm’s sibling Ari Emanuel and Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Obama continues to practice governing the nation with the finesse of a jackhammer operator doing a kidney transplant. Yet, never once have Fruit of the Loom grape man Wayne Wilderson or Brenda Strong of “Desperate Housewives,” colleague of esteemed “brainstorming” border security adviser Eva Longoria, questioned the craven cynicism of demonizing the rich while stuffing Hollywood capital into his campaign coffers.

Seems that even after chastising Americans for failing to “share the wealth,” a selectively philanthropic Barack Obama is more than willing to accept the “additional income” of well-to-do Hollywood supporters, if doing so finances his glitzy billion-dollar bid for reelection that should be coined: Take two.

So once again, America is witnessing the unbridled ignorance of affluent individuals who choose to support a President who decries prosperity but has little trouble siphoning off the wealth of a community too clueless to understand who they’re really supporting and too committed to liberal ideology to really care.

The political left loves shout-outs, and this was a direct one to Zinn himself, whom Damon actually lived next-door to as a child, and whose book apparently knocked the actor on his own behind. “Ben (co-screenwriter Affleck) and I were laughing our asses off writing that,” he recalls. (What is it with Damon and the word “ass”?) ”We liked it that the smartest guy in Boston was reading Howard Zinn.”

Self-proclaimed radical historian Howard Zinn, 87, is arguably the most popular proponent of the “history from below” school of historiography, which explores past events from the perspective of everyday people as opposed to the so-called “Great Men” theory, which actor Josh Brolin, another Zinn devotee, calls mere “propaganda.” The Boston University professor wasn’t the first academic to pioneer this approach, but he is no doubt the first to dispense with tedious scholarly ballast like footnotes and citations, and to have pop culture powerhouses like Damon, Brolin and Pearl Jam running interference for his openly politicized agenda. His 1980 book A People’s History of the United States, one of the best-selling history books of all time thanks partly to Damon’s shout-out, is a litany of oppression and exploitation on the part of America’s white ruling class, a “raggedly conceived Marxist caricature” of American history, as David Horowitz calls it in Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left.

Yet Zinn’s book is as ubiquitous in high school and university classrooms as sexual tension. His website proudly asserts that “no other radical historian has reached so many hearts and minds.” Well certainly, no other has darkened as many young hearts toward America and clouded as many young minds with utter disdain for facts and objectivity. Like his fellow academic cult figure Noam Chomsky and President Obama’s former associate and ghostwriter, unrepentant-terrorist-turned-radical-educator William Ayers, Zinn’s world view is powered by a relentless and hateful leftist fantasy: that the American government is and always has been racist, oppressive, warmongering, and ruthlessly exploitative, and that it must be subverted. And that subversion begins in classrooms all across America, which is why the left has worked so hard over the decades to imbed itself in America’s educational system. 

Zinn encourages among students what journalists in the age of Obama have openly embraced: not even a pretense of objectivity or balance. “Objectivity is impossible,” he once claimed. Granted, historians have long accepted that no writer of history can be completely free of all cultural and personal bias. But whereas this self-awareness normally spurs historians to strive all the harder for objectivity and fidelity to facts, Zinn’s solution is to embrace bias and selectivity as positives, and use them as tools for the left’s Utopian pursuit of social justice: “If you have any kind of a social aim,” says Zinn, ”if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.” (Emphasis added) In other words, it’s not enough for historians to piece together the clearest, most honest picture of the past to give us insight into our present and future; they are morally obligated to selectively shape the material in ways that they think will advance certain causes, even at the expense of truth. This is not historiography; this is, as Josh Brolin might say, propaganda.

Along with objectivity, Zinn jettisons some historical highlights that might actually give young Americans reason to feel proud of and more knowledgeable about their country. A Conservative History of the American Left’s author and Big Hollywood contributor Daniel J. Flynn notes some of the significant omissions in the People’s History:

Washington’s Farewell Address,  Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate all fail to merit a mention. Nowhere do we learn that Americans were first in flight, first to fly across the Atlantic, and first to walk on the moon. Alexander Graham Bell, Jonas Salk, and the Wright Brothers are entirely absent. Valley Forge rates a single fleeting reference, while D-Day’s Normandy invasion, Gettysburg, and other important military battles are skipped over. In their place, we get several pages on the My Lai massacre and colorful descriptions of U.S. bombs falling on hotels, air-raid shelters, and markets during the Gulf War of the early 1990s. 

Harvard historian Oscar Handlin not only exposed the book’s flaws long ago and shredded Zinn’s “deranged fairy tale”; he also expressed a keen insight: “Brendan Behan once observed that whoever hated America hated mankind, and hatred of humanity is the dominant tone of Zinn’s book.”

Zinn’s experience flying bombing missions in Europe during World War II had a profound effect on him and shaped his perspective of America as an imperialist evil. He went on to become a civil rights and anti-war activist, writing books such as Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal and You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train. On his website Zinn states, “I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power.” This is the kind of nonsensical, anti-establishment rant one would expect from a seventh-grader, not from one of the most influential educators in the country. The KSM’s of the world should be freed from jail, and the Bush-Cheney-CIA axis of evil should be in jail? Yes, that would certainly set the world right. “What’s required,” he says, ”is a total turn­around. We want a country that uses its resources, its wealth, and its power to help people, not to hurt them.” (Emphasis added) Is America perfect? Is our history without stain? Far from it. But only the pathologically anti-American left can deny that this country has used its resources, wealth, and power largely for good, more than any nation in human history.

This perverse worldview lands Zinn on the wrong side of every issue he addresses: he expressed solidarity with vile academic fraud Ward Churchill, who dismissed the 3,000 victims of the 9/11 attacks as “little Eichmanns”; he placed the blame for those attacks squarely on the shoulders of American foreign policy, completely ignoring the underlying religious motivation; he endorsed the 9/11 truther movement; he offered support for former professor Sami al-Arian, who was jailed for his key role in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as “a victim of a cruel system, in which the rights of anyone who dissents from government policy are in danger”; he denounced “the so-called ‘war on terror’” as “an act of terrorism” itself (“This is not the behavior of a democracy but of a totalitarian state”); and he espoused the moral equivalence of suicide bombing (“The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent”) as well as the moral equivalence of the terrorists themselves (“the U.S. was reacting to the horrors perpetrated by the terrorists against innocent people in New York by killing other innocent people in Afghanistan”).

Next week Matt Damon, still fresh-faced but now a $10 million-a-movie anti-capitalist, will use his stardom and boyish smile to promote Zinn’s work again. On Sunday The History Channel will serve as a delivery system for Zinn’s subversive anti-American agenda: a documentary co-produced by Damon entitled “The People Speak,” based on A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which Zinn co-edited with anti-war-on-terror socialist Anthony Arnove. Other Hollywood stars like Brolin, Marisa Tomei, Morgan Freeman, Viggo Mortensen, Rosario Dawson, and Kerry Washington have enlisted to put a pleasing face on this stealth attack (and not only in front of the camera; behind the scenes, Oscar-winning screenwriter Paul Haggis is on the Voices Advisory Board) which will launch on multiple fronts, including a classroom study guide, a performance tour of college campuses around the country, and a soundtrack album. The song titles hint at the soundtrack’s (and the project’s) tone: “The Drums Of War,” “Only A Pawn In Their Game,” “American Terrorist,” “Dear Mr. President,” “Masters of War.” Take that, rapacious military-industrial complex!

Why does a mere History Channel presentation featuring attractive, well-meaning celebrities merit concern? What is at stake here? To return to David Horowitz: “The two Americas that matter in the War on Terror are not those of rich and poor… (They) are an America that embraces its heritage and purposes, and an America that has seceded from both.” The secessionists like Howard Zinn know full well the effectiveness of disseminating their corrosive ideas through education and Hollywood, which Liberal Fascism’s Jonah Goldberg labels “the most powerful propaganda agency in human history.” These arenas are key to indoctrinating America’s youth and eroding the patriotism that Zinn claims “has caused so much death and suffering.” What is at stake is America’s ability to stand strong and united against the Islamic threat and the challenge of rising new superpowers. What is at stake is our heritage and purpose, as Horowitz would say. What is at stake is the hearts and minds of our nation’s youth.

In that context, Good Will Hunting’s “smartest guy in Boston” is starting to look like little more than a useful idiot.