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eska“Argo” has a shot at winning Best Picture on Sunday. It’s a good old-fashioned American story about good old-fashioned American ingenuity. It’s tight and intelligent. Its satire of Hollywood is as affectionate as it is sharp. Its politics, to the extent it has any, are basically liberal. How can the Academy not love it? To beat it, you’d have to make a movie starring, I don’t know, Abraham Lincoln himself.
“Zero Dark Thirty,” however, has no chance. I haven’t seen it, so for all I know it may be greatly superior, simply as filmmaking, to “Argo.” It probably contains a smaller number of historical inaccuracies than “Argo” (or even that other movie about American history). But what is widely seen as its one huge inaccuracy—its suggestion that torture “worked,” that without torture Osama bin Laden would still be watching videos in his suburban villa in Pakistan—is fatal. Kathryn Bigelow’s previous outing, “The Hurt Locker,” won the Oscar not just because it was a terrific movie but because it hit the political sweet spot. People who were against the Iraq War loved it, and so did people who were for the Iraq War. Fairly or unfairly, though, for many Academy members, to vote for “Zero Dark Thirty” is to a vote for Bush, Cheney, and torture.
“Zero Dark Thirty,” however, has no chance. I haven’t seen it, so for all I know it may be greatly superior, simply as filmmaking, to “Argo.” It probably contains a smaller number of historical inaccuracies than “Argo” (or even that other movie about American history). But what is widely seen as its one huge inaccuracy—its suggestion that torture “worked,” that without torture Osama bin Laden would still be watching videos in his suburban villa in Pakistan—is fatal. Kathryn Bigelow’s previous outing, “The Hurt Locker,” won the Oscar not just because it was a terrific movie but because it hit the political sweet spot. People who were against the Iraq War loved it, and so did people who were for the Iraq War. Fairly or unfairly, though, for many Academy members, to vote for “Zero Dark Thirty” is to a vote for Bush, Cheney, and torture.
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