King's Speech, Queen's Wave, Facebook Fury

This year's Oscars are about something.

One marvelous movie recalls a day in June, 1939 at the New York World's Fair, a 15-year-old boy watching an open car with the King and Queen of England slowly driving by, less than fifty feet from his excited eyes.

Until then, the outside world had been grainy newspaper pictures and black-and-white newsreels, but here was a flesh-and-blood couple, he in resplendent uniform, she in a pale blue dress doing a languid backhand wave as if strewing invisible rose petals to the crowd.

Within weeks, Hitler would invade Poland to start World War II and four years later the boy, now in uniform, would be in a truck, speeding past manicured English fields greener than any he had ever seen before.

These sensual memories arise from this year's Academy Awards as "The King's Speech" competes with "The Social Network"--contrasting two worlds in which mass media create totally different realities.

A radio address is at the heart of the former, a kind of reverse "My Fair Lady," wherein a commoner tutors a speech-impaired monarch. Instead of turning a flower girl into a duchess, this Pygmalion teaches a king to reach out to people like the flower girl.

In today's world, communication is infinitely more complex. When "The Social Network" came out months ago, critics complained that Facebook was more likely to flood the world with trivia rather than foster social change.

Now we know better as crowds across the Middle East topple repressive regimes, communicate with each other online and evade official censorship with cell-phone videos while demonstrations here at home echo public disaffection.

As actors, directors and producers make their dazed acceptance speeches at the Oscars, they will be taking part in something beyond Hollywood's usual self-glorification over pandering to public tastes.

The scene may evoke that endless hall of mirrors in the climax of Orson Welles' "Lady from Shanghai," in which multiple images merge reflections and real life. But isn't that what movies are supposed to do, even as today's journalism unwittingly competes with them?

Tea Party, Hollywood Style

James Cameron was not king of the world this time as his former wife took custody of all the Oscars for an explosive low-budget howl of pain in this time of American rage.

Symbolically, millions of metropolitan New Yorkers were blinded to it all by a clash between two Goliaths of greed, ABC and Cablevision, acting out for the night in their living rooms what Wall Street has been doing to them everywhere for years.

What they missed was the usual Hollywood display of self-congratulatory pseudo-sensitivity with a few new wrinkles in the age of Obama. Oprah was on hand to celebrate African-American suffering in shape of the obese "Precious," but there was a nod to equal-opportunity insipidity in a cameo by Tyler Perry as a presenter and a loony interracial squabble over the award to a documentary about an African singer.

Pop sociology was also served by the performance of Barbra Streisand, who has been kvetching for decades over not being the first woman to get an Oscar for "Yentl," as the presenter to Kathryn Bigelow, who broke the barrier with her smashmouth movie about Iraq. "The time has finally come," Streisand emoted.

Instead of the usual Bob Hope-ish gagfest, MCs Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin did a minimalist turn, starting with a low-heat roast of Meryl Streep, George Clooney and all the icons in the front rows, who seemed to be struggling to keep smiling.

Toward the end, in this era of reality, even the losers' obligatory pasted-on smiles were slipping off after they had endured long valentines from other stars before coming up empty-handed.

For someone who has watched "The Fabulous Baker Boys" with pleasure over a dozen times, the highlight was Michelle Pfeiffer's love note to an older, hairier Jeff Bridges, who should have been rewarded back then for his turn as a bitterly depressed romantic but finally got one last night for playing a musical survivor.

The Academy's snub of the innovative and wildly lucrative "Avatar" will no doubt be parsed by pundits in coming days, but for the moment, put it down as a Tea-Partyish protest against the powers-that-be in Tinseltown.

Honoring Our Dead

HBO's premiere this weekend is more than a movie. "Taking Chance" has all the elements of a feature film--actors, plot and dramatic form--but it is an act of reverence and respect for young men and women who go off to die for their country in distant places.

As the Hollywood elite dress up to congratulate themselves at the glitzy Oscars tonight, this 90 minutes, based on the experience of a Marine colonel accompanying the coffin of a fallen young man home for burial is a reminder of the power of the medium to move us deeply with simple truths.

"Taking Chance" comes at a time when the President and the Pentagon are deciding whether or not to let cameras record the arrival of coffins from the Middle East. (Dorian De Wind has an excellent review of the arguments on both sides at The Moderate Voice.)

What is so heartbreaking about the film is seeing the love and care lavished on those who lives end before their time in hate and violence. There are no special effects, no swelling music to cue our emotions, no grandiose speeches, just the simple truth of how hard it is for all of us to lose them.

It should be required watching for all politicians.