A Look at the Oscar Winners

At the 82nd Academy Awards, several of the year's big winners highlighted some important causes, either in overt or subtle ways.

Let's start with the little film that could: The Hurt Locker swept the awards, picking up Best Picture, Directing, Original Screenplay, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing. Unfortunately, a lot of the buzz has been pitting Kathryn Bigelow against ex-husband, Avatar director James Cameron, and amping up her film's David-and-Goliath victory over Cameron's blockbuster. The more important buzz, however, is about the historic moment that her win represents: Bigelow is the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director. Bigelow herself has expressed reluctance about hyping up the feminist side of her win. I think it's important to acknowledge that a woman was recognized for making an amazing film, with brilliantly executed and suspenseful sequences like this:



Check out my last post to see why The Hurt Locker ranks on my list of the top ten most important war films.

Precious, based on the novel "Push" by Sapphire, was another little film that rocketed to the top and won big at festivals around the world, before winning an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Actress Mo'Nique, previously known for coarse comedy performances, won an Academy Award for her dramatic performance. She is the fourth black actress to win in the Best Supporting Actress category. Precious is not an easy film to swallow: its main character, played by Gabourey Sidibe, is an obese, illiterate 16-year-old African American girl in Harlem, who has been impregnated twice by her father and abused physically, mentally and sexually by her mother (Mo'Nique). It unflinchingly shows us situations that we would rather not acknowledge exist in America and I'm thrilled that these issues got exposure at the Oscars.

Sandra Bullock, romantic comedy darling, won for Best Actress for her dramatic performance in The Blind Side, the true story of football player Michael Oher. Like Precious, the movie highlights American poverty with its portrayal of an impoverished African-American foster child, who is adopted by a suburban family and discovers a talent for football.

The Short Documentary Winner, Music By Prudence, also tackles poverty, this time out of America. The film depicts the life of Prudence Mabhena, a Zimbabwean girl with a debilitating condition called arthrogryposis, who escapes her abusive upbringing thanks to a scholarship she received for her singing talents. In The Blind Side and Precious, the main characters also end up embracing education in the end, with Precious resolving to take the GED and Michael Oher embracing a college education with a football scholarship.

Crazy Heart, a movie about a country singer trying to turn his life around, for which Jeff Bridges won the Best Supporting Actor award, is not usually heralded as a cause-based movie. I've chosen to include it because it features a major story line in which the main character struggles with severe alcoholism. I've never seen such a vivid and gritty portrayal of the life of an alcoholic - we see Bridges throwing up on himself and driving his car off the road in a stupor. Its a multifaceted look at the issue, even if the ending, in my opinion, ties up his recovery too neatly and easily.

The most obvious cause-related winner, of course, is The Cove, a personal favorite of mine. See my post for a more in-depth look at why The Cove is one of the most important documentaries, environmental or otherwise, to come along in a while. Participant Media, producers of one of the most famous Oscar-winning docs, An Inconvenient Truth, did it again with this win. Their documentary Food, Inc., was also in the running. Both The Cove and Food, Inc. have been helping to make feature documentaries mainstream, something that, in my opinion, needs to happen without Michael Moore's name attached.

Avatar is being talked about more for what it didn't win than what it did, which was Oscars for Visual Effects, Cinematography and Art Direction. Despite missing out on other awards, it nevertheless remains an appealing commentary on anti-militarism, conservation, and tolerance. It's easy to see, even from the trailer, why it swept the technical awards:



For all these movies, although Avatar hardly needs more viewers, I hope that these wins will draw more attention to the causes at the root of each story. It would be nice to see the media give some attention to the issues in between the red carpet coverage.