Yeah, I realize I’m several days behind on this, but just in case you hadn’t seen it, here’s some rain for the Al Gore Nobel Peace Prize parade — courtesy of the West Australian. And, like, carbon blankets, probably:
A conservative think-tank in New Zealand has written to the president of the America’s Academy Awards asking that the Oscar awarded to the director of an Inconvenient Truth be taken back.Former New Zealand MP Dr Muriel Newman, director of web-based think-tank the New Zealand Centre for Political Research, said she had taken the measure in response to a British High Court ruling Thursday.
[...]
A British judge ruled an Inconvenient Truth, whose director Davis Guggenheim won an Academy Award for best documentary feature, contained scientific errors.
The judge said the film could be shown in British schools, although it must have guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination.
The controversial documentary starred former US vice president Al Gore talking about the perils of global warming.
“The truth, as inconvenient as it is to Al Gore, is that his so-called documentary contained critical distortions that are quite contrary to the principles of good documentary journalism.
“Good documentaries should be factually correct. Clearly this documentary is not,” a statement from Newman said.
“This situation is not unlike that confronting sports bodies when their sports stars are found to be drug cheats. In such cases, the sportsmen and women are stripped of their medals and titles, with the next placegetter elevated.
“While this is an extremely unpleasant duty, it is necessary if the integrity of competitive sport is to be protected,” she said.
Of course, what Ms Newman doesn’t understand is that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences never truly believed Gore’s “documentary” to be such — just as they never believed Michael Moore’s Oscar-winning “documentary” to be anything more than a feature-length bit of political propaganda.
But here’s the thing: by the lights of our betters (and those in the industry are clearly that, else why would providence grant them such perfect teeth and expensive clothing?), the messages these “documentaries” are transmitting are the correct ones, making their factual flaws negligible.
After all, is anything more bourgeois than allowing oneself to be constrained by Enlightenment rationalism?
And is it not the job of the artist to beat back the Tyranny of the “Proof”?
Gore and Moore have done nothing “wrong” precisely because there is no wrong — only degrees of righteousness, and the means to make sure that righteousness is elevated to policy status.
Looked at from that perspective, they haven’t broken the rules of “documentary filmmaking.” Instead, they’ve simply pushed the envelope of what comes to count as “documentary”.
Opening up the field to allow for consensus-driven propaganda, then, is the mark of artistic bravery!
Perhaps the Academy needs a new award category to account for its own brilliance — with a statuette given each year to the Academy for its willingness to celebrate itself for a willingness to celebrate itself.
Of course, if there’s any justice, Oscar™ will have his hand on his crank in a show of perfectly gilded onanism.
But then, those are the kinds of details that can be ironed out later. For now, just get PSYCHED!
(h/t Newsbusters)
Comment by JD on 10/16 @ 10:04 am #
The mere idea that Gore or Moore’s propoganda flicks were anything close to a documentary is laughable, and shows how little actual thought is given to the term by the Academy.
The Nobel is even worse, by several orders of magnitude, and it has the aura of legitimacy even to those that do not understand the nature of this award. For decades to come, the Left will use this award as some sort of proof of the veracity of algore’s Chicken Little act.
As always, if the Left wants me to start taking their claims of this being a crisis seriously, it would behoove them (this means you, algore, Kennedy, et al.) to start living their lives as though they believe it is a crisis.
Comment by RDub on 10/16 @ 10:04 am #
I think I speak for everyone when I say: there’s a conservative think-tank in New Zealand?
Comment by alppuccino on 10/16 @ 10:04 am #
Is there a chance that my Wonka Bar was not hand-dipped from a river of chocolate by a blue midget?
Comment by alppuccino on 10/16 @ 10:06 am #
“I think I speak for everyone when I say: there’s a conservative think-tank in New Zealand?”
Don’t tell PiatoR. That has got to be one lonely think-tank.
Comment by JD on 10/16 @ 10:07 am #
Any bets on whether the Academy actually critically reviews this request?
Comment by JD on 10/16 @ 10:08 am #
I miss PIATOR. The internal contests to see who could come up with the best knock-off of his nomme de blog was always hysterical.
Comment by Slartibartfast on 10/16 @ 10:09 am #
Wait…you mean I won’t have beachfront property anytime soon?
Jesus, bad news all over.
Comment by happyfeet on 10/16 @ 10:16 am #
Special Rules For The Documentary Awards
I guess it doesn’t say “essentially self-promotional”… so I guess Al would win the tie on that one.
Comment by Dan Collins on 10/16 @ 10:17 am #
Tyranny of teh Proof?
It’s my own. Personal. Exegesis.
Comment by TheGeezer on 10/16 @ 10:26 am #
I keep wondering what will happen when the schedule of global warming alarmism fails. I mean, a GW apparatchik must in time recognize the fallacy of assertions, the unscientific silliness of it all, when, for example, oceans do not rise according to alarmist expectations. What happens then? To what new excuse will social engineers adhere to justify expansionist governments and suppression of liberty and prosperity?
Comment by alppuccino on 10/16 @ 10:28 am #
Hey happyfeet,
what about a documentary on the making of a documentary?
Comment by kelly on 10/16 @ 10:31 am #
Comment by kelly on 10/16 @ 10:32 am #
This is Spinal Tap
Comment by alppuccino on 10/16 @ 10:35 am #
……or a “Rockumentary” if you will………but enough of my yackin’, let’s boogie!
Comment by Slartibartfast on 10/16 @ 10:43 am #
That sucked, Dan. I say that, chock full of admiration and disgust, mixed in roughly equal proportions.
Comment by happyfeet on 10/16 @ 10:44 am #
Thing is, Hollywood thinks it’s making a difference. But I think the meta-documentary was done for Farenheit – but that was more of a counterdocumentary that did trace the making of the original film as part of its argument.
An existential crisis about which a “consensus” has formed to the effect that the only available defenses are cajolery and punitive taxation is very empowering for these guys I think. I’m inclined to hope that the Nobel will mark the peaking of this nonsense. The incredibly boring nature of NPR’s reporting on the subject – they are doing a year-long series – suggests I think that there’s some real problems with further crescendo-building.
Comment by happyfeet on 10/16 @ 10:45 am #
My parents never sent me to italics camp. I begged and begged.
Comment by wishbone on 10/16 @ 10:45 am #
“I keep wondering what will happen when the schedule of global warming alarmism fails.”
Remember post-Katrina?
“THE GODLESS HURRICANES ARE COMING TO KILL US ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! EVEN KANSAS!!!!!!!!!!”
Wake me up when global warming results in an outbreak of Brazilian beachfront female fashion trends. Until then…yawn.
Comment by Mike C. on 10/16 @ 10:47 am #
Too bad these people only risked their lives to advance the cause of human liberty. Had they chosen the truly brave path of making a polemic film disguised as a documentary they may have been deemed worthy of recognition.
Comment by dicentra on 10/16 @ 10:48 am #
Perhaps the Academy needs a new award category to account for its own brilliance  with a statuette given each year to the Academy for its willingness to celebrate itself for a willingness to celebrate itself.
I thought thats what the Oscars already were.
Comment by happyfeet on 10/16 @ 10:53 am #
I really enjoyed the weather this year.
Comment by happyfeet on 10/16 @ 10:53 am #
subversive
Comment by psychologizer on 10/16 @ 10:55 am #
scoliosis
Comment by happyfeet on 10/16 @ 10:57 am #
meaning over time we are being pathologically warped by this nonsense is my guess
Comment by dicentra on 10/16 @ 10:57 am #
Too bad these people only risked their lives to advance the cause of human liberty. Had they chosen the truly brave path of making a polemic film disguised as a documentary they may have been deemed worthy of recognition.
Well, you see, Mike, if they honor people who perform acts of extraordinary bravery, it makes them look bad. Who among them (or many of us, for that matter) are capable of such things?
Nope, better to honor someone for a pseudo-scientific PowerPoint presentation, which any moron can do. Because then we’re all heroes!
Comment by SGT Ted on 10/16 @ 11:06 am #
Jeff,
I think you are cutting the Academy too much slack. Thee is plenty of eveidence that these Hollyweirdo’s really really believe in AGW.
Comment by Rick on 10/16 @ 11:12 am #
Because then we’re all heroes!
As Steve Colbert might say: And So Can You!
Cordially…
Comment by Patrick Carroll on 10/16 @ 11:22 am #
New Zealanders generally despise Americans, and New Zealand itself is a bit of a leftist swamp.
I guarantee you, the only reason anyone in New Zealand gives a sheep turd about “An Inconvenient Truth” is to cause some amount of trouble in the USA.
I look forward with much amusement, however, to the unhinged, foam-flecked response of the American Watermelon Left.
Comment by Mike C. on 10/16 @ 11:38 am #
The self-esteem culture taken to its logical extreme.
Comment by LionDude on 10/16 @ 11:40 am #
I shudder at the fact that the Moore/Gore op/ed snooze-fest films were nominated in the same category as the absolutely brilliant “Hoop Dreams”. An insult to documentary filmmaking.
Plus I’d love to see Arthur Agee reverse tomahawk dunk in Michael Moore’s mug.
Comment by McGehee on 10/16 @ 11:45 am #
Well, considering that Oompa Loompas are orange…
Comment by RiverC on 10/16 @ 11:49 am #
This is post 10001. That must count for something.
Comment by alppuccino on 10/16 @ 11:49 am #
“Well, considering that Oompa Loompas are orange…”
GOD DAMN YOU ZENITH AUTO COLOR CONTROL!!
Comment by alppuccino on 10/16 @ 11:50 am #
…don’t tell MayBee.
Comment by Melkor on 10/16 @ 11:52 am #
Forget Mooreon and Goreacle, look at some of the highlights from the mainstream pix awards:
Whoopi wins Best Supporting Masked Creature for ‘Ghost’..
‘Gwyneth (Shakespeare) in Love’ beats ‘Saving Private Ryan’ for Best Picture…
Americans are all Racist Pig-Dogs (‘Crash’) wins Best Picture
Narcissistic. brain-dead script readers and their enablers use a klieg-lit soapbox to deliver schoolyard diatribes.
QUESTIONS, ANYONE?????
Comment by Slartibartfast on 10/16 @ 12:00 pm #
Looks like comment 100000 to me.
Comment by Slartibartfast on 10/16 @ 12:00 pm #
…there were nipples in Shakespeare in Love. Just saying, is all.
Comment by klrtz1 on 10/16 @ 12:03 pm #
The self-esteem culture taken to its logical extreme.
No, that would be: “WE ARE ALL GODS, BOW DOWN AND WORSHIP US!!1!
Comment by Melkor on 10/16 @ 12:07 pm #
Slart,
I’m not saying that Gwyneth can’t sit wherever she wants, but we’re talking movies here. MOVIES!!
Comment by Kevin_B on 10/16 @ 12:25 pm #
I think that historians will conclude that last week was the week that AGW leaped the Lamnidae
In the week that a British judge, not a species known for it’s RWDB sympathies or ties to Big Oil, declared that Inconvenient Truth was a piece of political propaganda and the film received the most debased international prize in existence, an Oslo think tank found that the declared reason for giving the prize was shown to be nonsensical by the actual evidence.
This comes as two of the main planks of the AGW theory – the historical record shown by proxies and the historical/current record shown by instrumentation – are shown to be somewhat rickety and in danger of collapse.
Let Gore and his acolytes bask in their dubious “glory” since history will look back on them, and those who went along with their nonsense, with derision.
Comment by alppuccino on 10/16 @ 12:34 pm #
Albert Gores Alfred
Comment by Lost My Cookies on 10/16 @ 1:04 pm #
Lemonade? What?
Comment by dicentra on 10/16 @ 2:09 pm #
I’ve been following, to the best of my ability (which isn’t much) the goings-on over at Climate Audit, where Steve McIntyre et al. are dissecting the newly released GISS data, as well as other proxy data sets that they can find.
Apparently, there’s a new type of causality, heretofore unknown, wherein tree rings, for example, do not reflect local conditions such as rainfall or temperature, but mysteriously correspond to conditions elsewhere on the planet.
BECAUSE OF THE GLOBALIZATION!
Seriously, McIntyre has uncovered some serious malfeasance in the scientific community. When trying to access a listserv at the U of Arizona to retrieve some data, they actually blocked his IP address (he easily got around it), and he’s found all kinds of data series that are marked “restricted” or “censored” for no apparent reason other than they don’t correspond to Teh Narrativeâ„¢.
It’s not just one big lie, it’s tons of itty bitty lies all over the place, upheld by people who don’t want to see all that sweet grant money dry up when it turns out that there’s no there there.
Comment by Merovign on 10/16 @ 2:33 pm #
Dicentro cries “bingo!”
New game, anyone? :)
Comment by Rob Crawford on 10/16 @ 6:01 pm #
“American Beauty”
Comment by Dan Collins on 10/16 @ 6:05 pm #
You can say that, again.
Comment by Slartibartfast on 10/17 @ 4:18 am #
Sorry. There are 10 kinds of people…
Comment by Matt, Esq. on 10/17 @ 6:16 am #
They gave a nobel to a Arafat, a terrorist. IMHO, thats about all that needs to be said about the so called legitimacy of the prize.