By now the word has spread through the entire first world: Zero Dark Thirty failed to track down the Best Picture Oscar. Of course, the filmmakers knew that a while ago because they tortured the info out of the academy.
It didn’t completely fail. Sure, it didn’t win best picture or best actress, but it did manage an even more impressive tie for the real beauty prize, the one Oscar every studio is most excited about, Best Sound Editing. It tied with the new Bond film, which really is amazing. If you can make a real intelligence film sound exactly as good as a fake one, you deserve at least half an Oscar.
There are rumors that it didn’t do as well as previously expected because of the political backlash from its portrayal of torture. That’s nonsense. Zero didn’t glamorize torture, it glamorized hard work and dedication to a cause. The real problem with the film is its unrealistic portrayal of institutional competence.
At its heart, Zero Dark Thirty is an uplifting film about how even an insanely hot woman can succeed if she works hard enough. That’s a message that I expected The Academy to support.
Zero Dark Thirty was better than Argo. Not sure about the other nominees. I hope the choice wasn’t made based on politics, but it wouldn’t surprise me. It could also just be because she won for her last movie.
And the Oscar goes to …. The Department of Defense. For their exemplary job assisting Hollywood with this turgid piece of pure propagandist bullshit asserting Bin Laden was a Cobra Commander-esc terrorist leader, and not a complete CIA creation and asset, leading the mujahideen to victory against the Soviets in the 80’s with the US government funded Operation Cyclone, whose politically connected family has diplomatic immunity inside the United States, who was on kidney dialysis in an American Hospital in Dubai in June 2001, and whose “most wanted” FBI profile did not include the 9-11 attacks due to the lack of hard evidence connecting him to the crime.
No no, Osama Bin Laden was taunting the most sophisticated military, intelligence dragnet the world has ever know from a cave fortress in the hills of Afghanistan for over ten years. Then he was tracked down, shot, and unceremoniously dumped in the ocean before his death could be confirmed by any independent third party, in a story that seems to change at the State Department’s convenience.
“Zero didn’t glamorize torture, it glamorized hard work and dedication to a cause.”
Bullshit. Contrary to the blatantly propagandistic revisionism of the film, torture did not help us to find bin Laden, and it threw us off his trail for years because of the bad information it did produce. When confronted with this fact, the producers pivot from claiming the film is a “journalistic-style dramatization” to use of “artistic license”. The film was CIA propaganda through and through, and the Acadamy had the good sense to recognize that and not let them have it both ways.
Guspasho is correct.
While ZD30 didn’t “glamorize” torture–I’m not sure how you would even do that–it did overemphasize its part in capturing OBL (i.e. that it played any part at all) and normalized its use in the War on Terror. Even though we no longer “torture” detainees, in the minds of the American people it has become acceptable to do so in “extreme” circumstances.
Worse still, “fake” torture has become just another form of entertainment and not accompanied by any discussion about its morality. But yeah, it was “politics” and not some fleeting sense of ethics that prevented ZD30 from getting an Oscar. Good point, Alex.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/torture-in-kathryn-bigelows-zero-dark-thirty.html
If I wanted to watch America, FUCK YEAH! I could just watch that thing with the puppets
I hate torture, even Hollywood fake torture. The USA used and approved real torture is disgusting. Glamorizing it is pathetic.
My point, @guspasho and @Süpër Chüñdy is that watching the film it didn’t seem like an important part of what caught him. So you’re saying it oversold it but I’m saying I watched it, and it didn’t seem like they were selling it at all. The one piece of info they got out of a detainee wasn’t from torture it was from a clever interrogation technique called lying. The torture seemed horrible and a waste of time.
@AF WHAT?! The first fourth of the movie was all torture! Unbeknownst to you, not only was torture successfully “sold” in the movie, but you bought it and then asked for more. The movie presented a best-case scenario of how torture “works” and made it seem pivotal in OBL’s death.
Torture doesn’t “work” by inflicting enough physical and psychological pain that the detainee immediately gives up valuable information. Torture “works” as it is shown in ZD30: waterboarding, solitary confinement, and sleep deprivation are used to demoralize and disorient a person. Thereafter, the thinking goes, the detainee is more susceptible to standard interrogation techniques (e.g. lying, negotiation, good cop/bad cop).
This is what makes ZD30 so disheartening. It’s not a simplistic and sensational depiction of torture. This isn’t Jack Bauer jamming a fork into a guy’s knee and saving America from a dirty bomb. The script was written by a former journalist and the director defended it as a “reported film.” Yet missing from the fact-filled film was any discussion of the morality of torture or its legality.