My view is that the Academy and the whole industry are trying to find new themes so that it can turn in new directions. One virtue of The Reader was that it was so well made, so polished, its lighting and sets so subtle, but that was important in the generation just ended, when artiface becomes art by hiding itself in verisimilitude. Film has finally become post-Modern when it proclaims its artifice, which is what happens when the Bollywood dances and clearly labeled villains and heroes make Slumdog Millionaire into an escape movie, one easily recognized as such, rather than a portrayal of what Mumbai slums are really like. Moreover, the culture, at least of the Hollywood culture mavens, has moved on beyond the Holocaust, which means that the movie world has difficulty even recognizing that The Reader was a post-Holocaust movie, dealing with the generation afterwards more than the generation that had fought the war and therefore had been complicit in what happened during the war.

The same cultural sea change explains why Milk, not as good a movie but nevertheless well polished, did not come away with top honors. Hollywood has already done homosexuality when it gave the award for best actor to Tom hanks for his role in Philadelphia, and that was more than a few years ago. Despite the earnest speeches of Sean Penn and the writer who won for best screenplay, and the fact that the current Proposition 9 parallels the Proposition 6 of Milk's time, Hollywood wants to move beyond social causes--at least until a new occasion for self-righteousness arises, as it did with environmentalism, that having given rise to The China Syndrome, released to theatres just before Three Mile island released its toxic gasses, Jack Lemmon refused to publicize the movie on that basis lest the movie be seen as a way to exploit the tragedy. How exploitation? The movie had turned out to be an accurate prediction of what could happen, so why draw back from that?

But then again Hollywood has always felt ambivalent about its political sentiments, reminding itself that it is only in the entertainment business, Sean Penn saying to Charlie Rose that he doubted a mere actor could have much influence on the forces having to do with anti-homosexual legislation. I, for one, am pleased that Hollywood does, in fact, lead the way in many social causes, from race relations to gay and women's rights and perhaps, in the future, animal rights. Why not? If Mormons, mentioned by name at the Oscars, feel Hollywood is biased, that is just because any entertainment or intellectual industry, whether now or in Seventeenth Century London or Paris, sees things by its own lights, independent of the way things are seen in the King’s Court or is the countryside. One could hardly say that Utah is unbiased on many cultural questions. Would Mormons want every state to decide, Stephan Douglas like, on their own principles? Well, that would mean California and Connecticut could legalize gay marriage, but just as in Civil War days, you can't have states rights on fundamental moral issues, and so gay rights, like abolitionism, becomes a national controversy, just as the stimulus package at the moment is a national controversy because the federal government may well be insisting on its own regulations for unemployment benefits, which Bobby Jingal rejects. Well, either Louisiana wants the money or doesn't. The governor saying he will pick and choose which he will take on the grounds that Louisiana sends more to the federal government than it receives applies only if you concentrate on oil taxes. Louisiana is a debtor state, just as Florida and New York and California are creditor states. (I love that Jingal is adopting the old Pat Moynihan argument to his own purposes. A good argument keeps reappearing, however much in a distorted way.)

Whatever the Oscar ceremonies do not accomplish as art, given their inability to ever put on a production number that grips an audience or dancing that doesn’t seem leaden-footed; however flat the humor and the pacing, the Oscars do accomplish something. They leave the audience with the sense that Hollywood is indeed a kind of community, the glamour capital of the world, as the old expression went, where women dress up for a series of award ceremonies with more care than any teen age girl mobilizes for prom night and where there are heavy hitters (the established stars, some grown a bit portly or top heavy) and newbies (starlets whose names occasionally make it into People), and, most of all, a cultural consciousness that moves on from issue to issue, that evolves, and which the products of the industry elaborate, it not mattering whether commerce or art come first, only that they are entwined. In that light, the awkward patter offered by the stars in their introductions of one another is like a set of mini-sermons. The introduction of Marisa Tomei as a nominee for Best Supporting Actress was introduced with a stiff reminder that she had portrayed a stripper who kept her dignity even when she took off her clothes. Is the plight of working girls the next cause for Hollywood? Or is this just a reprise of a Hollywood preoccupation since the Silent Era, a political excuse now available for showing some skin? Hollywood presents itself as having the right to preach or moarn or enjoy and so as the mirror of a culture rather than as what it is, the active creator of culture.

Speaking of social causes, prospective or abandoned, you notice that civil rights didn't come up at all at this year’s Oscars. In fact, the only reference at the ceremony was a post-civil rights remark in which Gooding made fun of Robert Downey, Jr. having taken work away from a black man. Social causes are by and large culturally dormant at this particular social moment.  And, apparently to save time, so are fulsome tributes to once glorious stars now in the final years of their life. Remember the ovation for Charlie Chaplin? I thought the tribute to Jerry Lewis was on the shabby side. Yes, he may well have been only able to make very brief comments, but they could have gotten others to speak about him or show more clips from his movies and his telethon. He deserved better.

This brings us to Slumdog Millionaire, which I thought a shoddy piece of movie making, even though it won a number of technical awards. I thought it poorly light (either overexposed or too dark, though I know that the director can say that was deliberate); I thought the camera work was jumpy and the texture of the film grainy and that the only decent characterization was supplied by the male lead, who seems a very appealing person who probably did not grow up in a slum. The plot was faux Dickensian, presenting the leads as if they had not been sullied by the lives they led although the gangster brother had been, and that the contrast between the Western quiz show and the life of the slums too cheap an image to carry a movie—unless, that is, it is directed or created by Bob Fosse.

The reason I think the movie was such a critical success was that it did the job of presenting a new subject matter to replace the Holocaust and Black history and a variety of other themes that have dominated movie making for the past few generations. This movie moves into Southern Asia and, by extension, the whole of what used to be called “The Third World” as the setting for post-colonial movies; no more Heart of Darkness or British expatriates). It is a whole new field with a different set of stories and certainly a wealth of new settings to offer. How many times can you film New York and L.A.? Moreover, Asia is a brand new market for the movies, the idea being that stories set in India, already a land of moviegoers, will draw better than even The Titanic. I hope this is the case because it offers a cultural solution to Hollywood's economic problem rather than a technological one (digital animation) or a marketing one (Hollywood presently appealing to teenagers and American minorities rather than to old fogies like me). So good for Hollywood; I just hope they tell some stories that appeal to me as well. Is there an Indian Jane Austen?