George Clooney deserves an Oscar, not for his role in Syriana but for his role in pushing intelligent filmmaking. Here is a man who has used all the power that comes from making mindless money machines like Ocean’s 12 to make films like Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana, films that require the audience to pay attention.
As it happens I was unconvinced by Syriana. It was a film that failed to engage me emotionally, I found it too disjointed and labyrinthic. There was also the added distraction of hearing Arabic words pronounced without cognition, which along with the familiar landscape of the cinematography gave the film a weird, almost dream-like sense of alternative reality to me. But still I applaud it because it raised questions that should be raised, regardless of whether or not we agree with the filmmaker’s viewpoint.
Clooney has been instrumental in convincing the film industry not only that it has a duty to challenge as well as entertain, but that issue-based films can be successful at the box office. Of course to some extent Michael Moore paved the way. The success of Fahrenheit 911 showed that there was a market for political films. But the difference between Clooney and Moore as filmmakers is that Clooney likes to ask questions whilst Moore likes to give answers. Fahrenheit 911 was a film which assumed that its audience was stupid and ignorant and needed educating. It was also a film that pushed a political agenda, whereas the films we have seen hit our screens this year have often been films with a political dimension rather than an agenda. They worked because of the strength of the stories they were telling. The Constant Gardener may have been a fierce attack on the politics of pharmaceuticals, but it was first and foremost a poignant love story. Similarly the power of Brokeback Mountain was that it was a compelling love story and not a film with an overt political agenda.
It has been an exceptional year. I don’t recall another year when the Academy Awards were not dominated by blockbusters like Titanic or fantasies like Lord of the Rings. Instead we had a bumper crop of films about social issues and in many cases films that did not necessarily portray the “free world” in glorious terms. Crash, which won best picture, was an uncompromising portrayal of racial tensions right there on Hollywood’s doorstep. A film that had no heroes, just characters with faults and weaknesses like the rest of us mere mortals. What a contrast to earlier Hollywood treatments of race relations in America! Just think of Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mocking Bird, a seminal film in the history of American cinema.
It is one of my favorite films, but part of the reason I love it is that it gives me a false sense of security. Atticus Finch is the perfect American, the kind of man who should be in the White House, but he is only a character from a novel.
All of this is yet another sign that people are waking up to the frightening state of international relations and are becoming increasingly reluctant to accept the official line. There is a thirst for knowledge and knowledge about the Middle East in particular. People want to understand the dynamics of what often seems an alien region to Western eyes. From Steven Spielberg’s Munich to Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, we see attempts to explain some of the complexity of the Middle East.
And for the first time, we had a Palestinian film in the running, a rare chance for audiences to gain first hand knowledge of daily life in Palestine. The film was Hany Abu-Asad’s Paradise Now, a film about two Palestinian suicide bombers. In December it won best script at the European film awards. In January, it won best film at the Golden Globe Awards.
For the Oscars, it received a nomination for best foreign-language film. This led to a virulent campaign to have the nomination removed. Israeli families started a petition against it and obtained over 32,000 signatures.
Lobby groups went as far as to argue that Palestine did not exist and that the film could not be described as being from Palestine but only from the Palestinian Authority. On the Arab side, a counter petition was launched. I was told more than 36,000 signatures were collected.
The Academy of Motion Pictures has refused to comment about the controversy but a visit to its website shows that it stuck to its guns. The film did not win best foreign-language film, but the nomination stood and, most importantly, it says right there for all to see that the country of origin is Palestine.
