Oscar Matters: "The Hurt Locker" and "In the Loop"

The Academy has steadily honored Iraq war documentaries but this is the first year that it honors dramatized depictions of the eight year war. That's partly because the war is happening and documentaries are better at capturing real time events. But dramatized depictions of the war harness the power of fiction to make the audience a part of the story.

In 2004, an election year, the Academy awarded the best documentary feature to Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara a cautionary tale about the Vietnam War and the trap of American hubris. This was the first of a series of documentary features honored by the Academy that marked a not so subtle protest of the Iraq war. During subsequent election years they continued the trend, nominating two Iraq war documentary features in 2006, Iraq in Fragments and My Country, My Country (neither won) and three in 2008, Taxi to the Dark Side (winner), No End in Sight, and Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. It's not shocking that the liberal peacenik hippies of lala land (i.e., the Academy) felt a moral obligation to shine a light on the blunders of the US invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. But this spotlight was a bit dim.

The documentary is a journalistic form of filmmaking that uses stark facts to tell a story. There's no CGI or clever editing techniques getting in the way of facts. People are interviewed while charts and graphs complete the narrative. Clear, concise and boring. This is not the escape from real life that a night at the movies promises, instead the documentary is a glaring reflection of real life. And while that is an extremely important exercise, especially in the case of the Iraq war, it's not a fun way to spend a Friday night. So while the Academy has honored these Iraq war documentaries with a meteor shower of nominations and Oscars they have failed to light up the sky so the average movie goer can't look away.

With 9 nominations for The Hurt Locker and one for In the Loop the Academy finally turns up the wattage on its Iraq war spotlight. With its nine nominations, The Hurt Locker is tied for the most nominations in 2010 meaning that the Academy is cementing it as one of the films to remember 2009 by. This is a truly great movie that tells a simple, compelling story about soldiers who search for meaning in life when life is cheapened by the scourge of war. Unlike it's documentary brothers, this movie does not delve into the political nuances of why and how the Iraq conflict proves or disproves the efficacy of a policy stance. Instead it deals with how the subtleties of human nature are affected by the Iraq war. The characters in the movie are specific yet representative of the diversity of people touched by this war.

It seems counter-intuative but I think fiction is better suited to reveal truth about human nature than true stories. I think it has something to do with the mutability of fictional realities verses the concreteness of real life. While watching The Hurt Locker I imagined what I would do if put into the same situations as the characters and that gave me a better understanding of myself which added to the film going experience. But when I watched Taxi to the Dark Side, I merely observed the actions of real people. What they did had consequences. Imagining anything different while watching that film would have taken away from the experience. And because most of our exposure to the war is through news reporting (true stories) we compartmentalize the war into something that is outside of ourselves, but fictional depictions of the war give us the latitude to internalize the human impact of the conflict.

The nomination for best adapted screenplay for In the Loop, a brilliant satire of pre-Iraq war Britain and America, was, to me, the biggest shock of the 2010 nominations. First of all, the Academy hasn't consistently honored comedies since the 30s and 40s. And I get it. Comedies are usually poorly made and unsophisticated. In the Loop is neither. The pacing of the movie is lightning fast. Jumping from Downing Street to Pennsylvania Ave, from the Pentagon to the UN this movie's rushed sense of urgency mimics the frenetic pace with which both countries decided to invade Iraq. The concept of hero and villain is obscured by the rampant incompetence and self-promotion of the technocrats on both sides of the Atlantic and the aisle. And after you've laughed at these boobs for an hour and a half you realize that these are the people who convinced you and the rest of the world that Saddam had WMDs. Our collective lack of scrutiny was the farce of this war. And again, you can never get that sort of visibility into human nature by just watching a true story.

As time passes, the films about Iraq will get better and hopefully the Academy will continue to honor all the films that teach us about this conflict but especially the films that expose our individual connection to and responsibilities for the Iraq war.