Where is the passion?

It seems that is recent year, there has been a noticeable lack of passion when it comes down to movies and the awards race. Sure there are a few performances that get people excited here and there, but on the whole, with Best Picture, it is all very blah.
Sure there have been the films in recent years that have captured the imagination, and expanded the limited range that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences considers to be Best Picture material, but those are very limited.

Sure there have been those films that make us jump up for joy, that make it to the Oscar beauty pagent.
2000 saw Ang Lee’s martial arts epic “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” break the foreign film and martial arts barrier in a very big way. And of course from 2001 to 2003 we not only had Peter Jackson’s brilliant fantasy trilogy “The Lord of the Rings”, but we also saw the hyper active musical love story “Moulin Rouge!” and again Ang Lee came to the rescue to bring us the heart breaking gay love story of “Brokeback Mountain”.
This is all wonderful but that is only six films out of thirty five. Something is up with the movie world.
Sure we can blame conservative Oscar voters, and smaller films getting crap distribution, but is that really all there is to it?
Is convention celebrated so freely, or is it just forced upon us?
Well there is a president in the white house who can barely work a speak-n-spell, and leans more to the K.K.K. side of thinking than is comfortable, and this may explain why films that make us question power (governmental, religious, racial, media even sexual) are few and far between in the main stream.

Then again in the 1970’s Nixon and Ford were both conservative republican presidents, and the Vietnam war was happening, and the movies being celebrated were worth getting sticky white love juice in your pants for. We had “M*A*S*H”, “A Clockwork Orange”, “Deliverance”, “Sounder”, “The Exorcist”, “American Graffiti”, “The Conversation”, “Jaws”, “Network”, “Taxi Driver”, “All the Presidents Men”, “Star Wars”, “The Deer Hunter”, “Apocalypse Now” and many others.
What a great list of movies, from a great decade. They posed questions, excited the imagination and some even acted as a form of protest to the way things were. What has happened? Where is the edge today? Where are all the passionate film makers?

Are people so afraid of practicing freedom of speech these days that they silence themselves?
Sure, we all know that freedom of speech is just a term people like to throw about. When you use it against the conservative masses you get booed, censored, become a public pariah and if you are a singer, you can get your CD’s steam rolled over. Some freedom.
We are living in scary times, and cinema/TV is our only escape from it.

Yet that is controlled by the MPAA, a group of conservative puppets who are watch dogs fighting sex (gay and straight) and nudity in case they corrupt Americas children. Ha!! I doubt the HUGE gun control problem has much to do with Heath Ledger giving Jake Gyllenhaal the ole spit and stick.

How sad is it that conservative politics/greed/and corruption have such a far reach that it has ensnared art in its grasp. If we cannot express ourselves through the arts anymore then we are nothing more than the plot outline in 2002’s “Equilibrium”.

”In a futuristic world, a strict regime has eliminated war by suppressing emotions: books, art and music are strictly forbidden and feeling is a crime punishable by death.”

A bit extreme, but you get the picture. I know I may seem a tad too preachy, touching on a lot of major social problems to explain why the silly Oscar race has seemed so boring as of late, but there is a truth to it all.
So far, all we have in mainstream media is Michael Moore flying the flag for freedom of speech.
We need more of him.
We need more filmmakers out there to get a dialogue going on the social, political and economic injustices in the world, and not just with documentaries.
Make things interesting, challenge yourselves and the world will be a better place. Make me passionate about the movies and not just the performances.