Liberal Oscar-winner (“An Inconvenient Truth”) Davis Guggenheim’s latest, “Waiting For Superman,” didn’t score an Oscar nomination. The cover story being floated is that it may contain inaccuracies. However, a look at several of the documentaries that were nominated demonstrates what a farce that charge is.
Guggenheim’s real crime was breaking with liberal dogma. The documentary takes on unions and is supportive of Charter schools. Significant issues with documentaries that were nominated makes it glaringly obvious that propaganda trumps facts and reality, even when it comes to documentaries in Hollywood:
What he found in his two years of researching “Waiting for Superman” (with co-producer Lesley Chilcott) was that a lot of schools aren’t right for any kids — neither the dull ones who need gentle prods to move competently from K to 12, nor the underprivileged bright ones who could be the Geoffrey Canadas of the future, if only a good charter school had enough slots to accept them all.
“Exit Through the Gift Shop” received a nomination despite many published concerns as to whether the film is even based upon reality, or simply a work of art. To invoke Al Gore, there seems to be no real consensus as to whether it even qualifies as a documentary. Clearly the academy was more captivated by the subject matter, street art, than concerns over a film’s reputation for integrity:
Much of the controversy surrounding the street art documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop surrounds whether the movie is real, or a prank. At ZUG, pranks and hoaxes are our business; after careful analysis, here’s our best guess.
IS THE MOVIE A PRANK? Yes and no. We think it starts out as a legitimate documentary, with Guetta intending to create a film about street artists. But it eventually becomes clear that he is a very bad filmmaker, and that is where the story begins to diverge from reality.
SO IF GUETTA IS SINCERE IN THE FIRST PART, AND ACTING IN THE SECOND PART, IS HE JUST A REALLY GOOD ACTOR? That part, admittedly, is a bit of a mystery.
In fact, the skepticism is so widespread the filmmaker was recently compelled to acknowledge it in the media surrounding the Oscars:
Obviously the story is bizarre, that’s why I made a film about it, but I’m still shocked by the level of skepticism. I guess I have to accept that people think I’m full of shit. But I’m not clever enough to have invented Mr. Brainwash, even the most casual on-line research confirms that.
Readers of Right-side new media will instantly recognize Charles Ferguson’s “Inside Job” as another alleged documentary seemingly more interested in propaganda, than an accurate account of the nation’s economic crisis:
“Inside Job,” the acclaimed new documentary by director Charles Ferguson, is a movie that tries to do for the economic crisis what Ferguson’s last film, “No End in Sight,” did for the Iraq War. In many ways, it succeeds.
Once again, Ferguson stands back, and also leans in close, to give you the big picture – in this case, how the unchecked growth of investment banking, the mania for deregulation, and the new-fangled application of principles of physics to the stock market all merged to create a high-finance runaway train that was destined to crash.
Ferguson does a ruthless job of revealing one aspect of the crisis that few have talked about: the selling out of prestigious economists who work in academia. Some of the most respected economic thinkers in the country made, and still make, huge amounts of money from consulting fees, and they were instrumental in lending credibility to corrupt policies.
I wouldn’t look for many, if any, mentions of the Community Investment Act, or the role of Fannie Mae, or Freddie Mac, from Ferguson. It’s all the fault of Wall Street, despite multiple well documented reports of how government regulation and interference -and the push to expand home ownership across populations that couldn’t afford it, set the stage for the collapse. Without those policies, there wouldn’t have been all those high-risk financial instruments which Wall Street traded to prop up tragically flawed government policies:
Two narratives seem to be forming to describe the underlying causes of the financial crisis. One, as outlined in a New York Times front-page story on Sunday, December 21, is that President Bush excessively promoted growth in home ownership without sufficiently regulating the banks and other mortgage lenders that made the bad loans. The result was a banking system suffused with junk mortgages, the continuing losses on which are dragging down the banks and the economy. The other narrative is that government policy over many years–particularly the use of the Community Reinvestment Act and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to distort the housing credit system– underlies the current crisis. The stakes in the competing narratives are high. The diagnosis determines the prescription. If the Times diagnosis prevails, the prescription is more regulation of the financial system; if instead government policy is to blame, the prescription is to terminate those government policies that distort mortgage lending.
There really isn’t any question of which approach is factually correct: right on the front page of the Times edition of December 21 is a chart that shows the growth of home ownership in the United States since 1990. In 1993 it was 63 percent; by the end of the Clinton administration it was 68 percent. The growth in the Bush administration was about 1 percent. The Times itself reported in 1999 that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were under pressure from the Clinton administration to increase lending to minorities and low-income home buyers–a policy that necessarily entailed higher risks. Can there really be a question, other than in the fevered imagination of the Times, where the push to reduce lending standards and boost home ownership came from?
The fact is that neither political party, and no administration, is blameless; the honest answer, as outlined below, is that government policy over many years caused this problem.
Still, another alleged documentary may well be the worst when it comes to spinning fiction into reality for a so-called documentary worthy of an Oscar nomination. “Gasland” by Josh Fox and Trish Adlesic has so much controversy swirling around it that seriously questions the film’s honesty, it’s led to a fledgling cottage industry debunking it and several states have gone on record (a document from Colorado’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission) challenging the honesty of the pseudo-documentary. But that didn’t slow down Hollywood or the Academy from embracing a bit of environmentalist propaganda disguised as fact:
On Feb. 1, industry group Energy In Depth (EID) sent a letter to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences arguing that Best Documentary Feature nominee Gasland is ineligible for a nod as the group maintains it’s a factually inaccurate work of “stylized fiction”.
“We’d like to take this opportunity to highlight the Academy’s posted criteria for entries nominated in the documentary feature category, and identify for you why we believe the work of one such nominee may fail to meet this standard,” EID’s executive director Lee Fuller writes in the letter.
Hollywood, through the Academy, has gone so far out on a limb peddling fiction as fact with its documentary nominees this year, one has to wonder if they aren’t panicking due to widespread rejection of Obama’s Leftist policies. It would be shameful if much of middle-America hadn’t already given up on Hollywood as much more than a Leftist propaganda mill.
One can only hope that as many people as possible become aware of what a farce the documentary category is this year. The message to future documentarians interested in getting any Oscar play seems clear. It’s fine to leave objectivity and facts on the cutting room floor; produce the best bit of Leftist propaganda you can and, who knows, it may rate as best documentary of the year. Who cares if it doesn’t document anything accurately? Not Oscar, it seems.