Hypocrisy On Parade

From an American Spectator article, Hollywood Crashes and Yearns :

Another Perspective [/] Hollywood Crashes and Yearns [/] By James Bowman [/] Published 3/7/2006 12:07:30 AM

[…] But Crash had something more than nostalgia for the comforting moral and political certainties of that revolutionary time. [Crash] had the monumental smugness of those who, like the Academy itself this year, think it a virtue in itself to be "aware" of social problems and who, in thinking about such problems, fancy their own sophistication as moralists, their own concerns for "society's victims," [to be greater] than [those of] their less enlightened fellow picture-goers.

Crash, like the Oscars themselves, blatantly appeals to the taste of the "movie community" for self-congratulation. Movie people swallow [Crash's] intolerable preachiness and easy didacticism because they think it is good for them, not because it is good in itself, let alone entertaining. They watch themselves watching Crash and think, not for the first time, "What fine fellows we are for thus showing that we care about racial prejudice in society." That word again!

In Crash, as much as in Brokeback Mountain, they want "society" back so that they can have something to rebel against. Until then, they have to play at being rebels and revolutionaries as well as serious moralists and political activists. Each pose is as false as the others, but by handing out awards to themselves for their serious-mindedness, the progressives of the movie community are able to sustain themselves -- and quite a lot of other people too -- in the illusion for just a bit longer.

James Bowman , The American Spectator's movie critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and media essayist for the New Criterion. [My ellipses and emphasis]