Trashing Hollywood

You’ve already heard and read dumps on Hollywood as being filled with effete snobs out of touch with America (of which it is only technically a part), but take a look at one more, resulting from the recent academy awards:

Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash – excuse me – Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline.

Just another Red State rant, right? Wrong.

This particular rant is not from the Right; it is sour grapes from Anne Proulx, the author of Brokeback Mountain, who complains in The Guardian that official Hollywood is more (gulp!) conservative than the real America.

We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture…. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver.

I almost wish she were right, but that’s no doubt because I must be a “conservative heffalump”: I’d actually prefer films based on The Scarlet Letter or runaway slaves or even the free silver debate (which was pretty interesting) to ones that had been stewing in the “yeasty ferment” of contemporary culture.

Ms. Proulx concludes her rant with a request:

For those who call this little piece a Sour Grapes Rant, play it as it lays.

I’m happy to oblige.