Party Line

In the future, we may look back on 2006 as the year the Oscars officially went from irritating to depressing. The year the crudely manipulative and politically anachronistic racial melodrama Crash won Best Picture is also the year American commercial cinema settled into its nursing home bed, stuck the morphine drip in its arm and began the long, slow journey toward the sweet hereafter.

Over the past couple of decades, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has had a hit-and-miss record with Best Picture winners, usually preferring to avoid giving the top prize to thematically or artistically daring movies. We've seen the prize go to handsome, safe movies (Out of Africa) or slick, safe movies (American Beauty) or earnest, safe movies (Driving Miss Daisy).

Once in a while the award goes to a movie with no sell-by date, a film like Amadeus or The Silence of the Lambs that's so superlative in every respect that if you made a list titled, "Reason To Watch this Movie," the phrase, "positive message" would be Number 9 or 10, if it was on there at all.

From Crash's Best Picture win to Reese Witherspoon's Best Actress prize for Walk the Line (she was excellent, but I wouldn't put it in her top-10 career best) to George Clooney's win as Supporting Actor for Syriana (awarded not in honor of his performance, but his creative and political power within the movie industry), it's clear that the Academy is less interested in aesthetic innovation (or state-of-the-art conventional excellence) than at any time since the late 1950s. The awards have lost all pretext of being anything but a self-congratulatory Hollywood party, thrown by people who want to let the world know how much good they're doing on behalf of this or that cause.

Meanwhile, truly independent films go begging. The incandescent Amy Adams from the tiny Junebug, a standard-bearer for excellence on a low budget, lost to Rachel Weisz, whose fine but far less daring performance in The Constant Gardener was a consolation prize for a big-budget, star-packed international co-production, the sort of movie now-defunct Miramax used to make.

Worse, foreign film had to be content with the televised equivalent of table scraps. As about.com critics Jurgen Fauth and Marcy Dermansky noted, the nominations for Best Foreign Language film, in addition to the winner, Tsotsi, "were listed with a notable lack of enthusiasm by Will Smith without so much as a clip of the films while their posters scrolled by in the background."

They rightfully point out, "Even animated shorts and sound editing got a montage-and Sophie Scholl's Julia Jentsch flew in from Berlin without getting shown in the broadcast once."

Honoring foreign film has fallen so far down the Academy's To Do list that we should not be surprised if, in five years, it shifts that duty to ceremony where scientific and technical awards are handed out.

Of course, one could argue that Americans are so distracted by the hubbub of truly mindless popular culture, and so accepting of the movie industry's master plan to ghettoize small American films and all foreign films beneath the one-size-fits-all label of "Art Film," that we should be glad whenever any halfway earnest American movie-no matter how inelegant and retro-makes enough of a cultural impact to be nominated as best picture and then win.

Unfortunately, if that's true, it means the most pessimistic movie critics are right: American movies really are dying as a popular art form (with emphasis on the word "form"). Perhaps the country itself hasn't become any more socially advanced than it was during the heyday of Stanley Kramer, whose soapbox dramas (The Defiant Ones, Judgment at Nuremberg) showcased an inarguably high level of commercial craftsmanship and an acknowledgement of human complexity, along with their soft-left sloganeering.

This is ultimately all that matters; judging the telecast itself is just a parlor game. Yes, the Oscar telecast was brisk, light and entertaining. Yes, Jon Stewart is a deft and amusing Oscar host, maybe the best since Johnny Carson. The Daily Show-style fake Oscar campaign ads were a hoot. The montages are the new musical numbers, a fact Stewart himself acknowledged when he implored viewers to send in any clips they had. And yes, it's still endearing to see a bit of the old variety show tackiness creep in: The best song number celebrating Crash, with its burning car and slo-mo zombie dancers, was a Debbie Allen special.

But all these things are distractions from the supposed purpose of the event, a purpose that has become increasingly obscured by the E!-ification of entertainment coverage. The Oscar telecast and its attendant hoopla make us complicit in the industry's triviality. As moviegoers, we got so wrapped up in surface questions (Will Jon Stewart be funnier than Chris Rock? Will the presenters or winners say anything controversial?) that we stop thinking about what movies are a means of aesthetic expression, not merely a vehicle for delivering messages. When a movie like Crash wins Best Picture, it means popular cinema has become another kind of advertising-a public service announcement.

Robert Altman's honorary Oscar, sweet and long overdue as it was, only underscored the direness of the situation. Pre-senters Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin did a smashing, seemingly off-the-cuff impression of Altman's patented overlapping conversational style, driving home the idea that Altman's cacophonous dramas illustrate his career-long conviction that what's being said cannot be separated from how you say it-that indeed, form should be as important as, or more important than, content.

Movies should not be content to be theater or TV drama or a public service announcement. They should be poetic and musical and mysterious and sometimes should make audiences work for their satisfaction. That Altman would be honored on the same night when a sinewy, simpleminded Short Cuts-manqué won Best Picture tells you all you need to know about how far we've fallen since the last great age of American movies-Altman's heyday, roughly 1966 to about 1983.

If Crash is what passes for a great and important movie right now, and if we have indeed gotten to the point where a movie's award-worthiness is primarily dependent upon the inarguable correctness of its message, and if America truly needs the schematic, circa-1970s tolerance lesson of Crash, then both the country and its movie industry are in even worse shape than we realized.

A friend of mine described Crash as a movie that believes in machina ex deus, a deliberate mangling of Latin that gets perilously close to the truth we saw expressed Sunday night: The machine is the god.