Today I intend to write about the losers. But before the reader ‘runs away', I don't mean Arabs and Muslims this time, but those who lost in the Oscars after being nominated for the awards. My motivation to do this is the fact that our newspaper and all other papers, along with TV networks around the world, decided to emphasize the winners, and I have nothing to add to what's been published and broadcasted in that regard. My interest in films is rather limited, and is often confined to the Cannes Film Festival, as I usually attend it with some friends (usually from onboard a yacht in the port). Nonetheless, I was more interested this time, because the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences increased the number of nominations from five to ten this year. At the top of the list of nominated films were Avatar (at the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, I attended an interview with its director James Cameron), the Hurt Locker, a film about the Bush administration's war on Iraq, and another film about the Nazis. I decided to watch whatever films I could while waiting for the results of the voting of 5777 members in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. But in the end, I could only watch Avatar, and wrote about it at the time, and Inglorious Basterds, but missed the Hurt Locker, which won the Oscar for Best Picture. The film's director Katherine Bigelow also won the Oscar for Best Director, becoming the first female director to ever win this award in 81 years of the Academy Awards. Attorneys representing Master Sergeant Jeffrey Sarver had announced that they are going to sue the film's screenwriter Mark Boal because he based 'virtually all of the situations' in the film on events involving the Master Sergeant. However, pundits are saying that there are citations for the phrase dating back to 1966. This is while noting that Mark Boal was embedded with the U.S forces in Iraq and witnessed many incidents involving bomb squad experts dismantling mines and IEDs. I missed the winning film as I opted to watch the film about the Nazis. I was afraid that the film would turn out to be yet another Holocaust propaganda film; however, I decided that its director and the actor playing its main character were enough compensation for me, as Brad Pitt is a very handsome actor, and I liked his performance in many other films. As for Quentin Tarantino, the director, he usually mixes violence and sex in his films. (I know nothing about the former except in what regards the aggressions against me as an Arab, my involvement in the latter involves more desire than ability). The film was not as I expected at all. Instead of being an anti-Nazi propaganda film, I felt that it was an anti-Jewish propaganda film. Although the Jews were the victims of the Nazis, the film revolves around a Jewish revenge gang led by an officer from Tennessee, played by Brad Pitt, who is a gentile from a state that is not known for its support for Jews or for any other ethnic group outside of its state borders. In the film, the Jews from the revenge gang engage in sadistic and savage attacks against Nazi soldiers, when instead, the film should have shown the Nazis engaging in such acts against the Jews. While we read that the Nazis killed Jews in gas chambers and buried them in mass graves, the film narrates the story of Jewish soldiers that are tasked, each, to kill one hundred Nazi soldiers and remove their scalps. I actually closed my eyes during each bloody scalping scene, although I'm a hunter, and I don't know how the viewers who never killed anything in their lives must have felt (during his trial, Barzan al-Tikriti said that he never killed an ant in his life, but was told that he is not accused of killing an ant, but thousands of human beings). We thus can include the movie Inglorious Basterds in the category of fantasy revenge films. However, Tarantino's imagination turned out to be much bigger than I thought, and the film ends with a scene in a movie theatre where a Nazi film entitled The Nation's Pride, about a Nazi sniper being honoured by the leadership, is being shown. Present in the theatre are Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and the entire Nazi leadership. All the cinema's doors are then shut and the theatre's owner, whose family was killed by the Nazis, sets fire to the films. The theatre is burned down, and all the Nazi leaders are killed by suffocation or by burning alive. Of course, this is historical fiction (like biblical history about the Promise Land), but which the Jews nonetheless wish had happened. I, too, wish that it happened, and that the Nazis were killed before they killed the Jews and before the [Holocaust] survivors were sent to colonize our countries. My final verdict on the film Inglorious Basterds is that it is a sick and violent film. Personally, I prefer Tarantino in his other violent films like Kill Bill, and I don't find his latest film to serve the Jews or the victims of the Holocaust, as it portrays the avengers as human monsters, and their violence in front of the camera is scary and appalling. If this film had won the Oscars, my relation to the Academy Awards would have ended, and I would have confined myself to following the Cannes Film Festival. However, it did not win. To the benefit of the reader, I learned many new facts as I followed the Oscars, which the reader can find online. The reader can search for and find the lists of the worst films that won in the Academy Awards, and other excellent films which failed to win, and also surprising wins and other films which were expected to win, but ended up losing. This is not to mention the unforgettable moments in the previous Academy Awards ceremonies. But if the reader is not an expert in using the internet, he can watch Avatar, and learn the story of a people that reminds of the Palestinians and their cause. [email protected]
