How utterly predictable is the backlash against the Oscars and its winners? 
First, the Academy is a club you earn your way into. The Oscars is its own annual club party. You don’t have to watch, you don’t get to go, it’s not about you.
It is a spectacle for those who want to eavesdrop and be a voyeur at a party to which you have no invitation. You don’t have to care at all. You don’t have to see any of the arty films that win. Continue reading
“Our society has distorted who we are, from slavery to the reconstruction, to the precipice at which we now stand. We have seen powerful white men rule the world while offering poor white men a vicious lie as placation” – The fictionalized Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 2014 Movie “Selma”
“And when the poor white man’s children wail with a hunger that cannot be satisfied, he feeds them that same vicious lie. A lie whispering to them that regardless of their lot in life, they can at least be triumphant in the knowledge that their whiteness makes them superior to blackness.”
Louis Cyr, our strongman, looks over St. Henri. 
The film American Sniper is directed by Clint Eastwood. His iconic characters’ memes may reek of vigilantism (cowboy or cop), however the films he helms often smell of moral ambiguity and reflection. But no matter what you shoot, it all depends if the audience is paying attention.
©2001 Marion Pennell
Reminiscent of American right wing patriots trying to co-opt Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” (the lyrics, people, read the lyrics!!!), American Sniper is about a over-hyped killing machine who loves war and is dispatched in the name of his country to kill in order to save American lives in Iraq. Continue reading
The old grey mare... 