I can't say if the Oscar 2010 ceremony was dull or deadly because I didn't watch most of it. In fact, I watched maybe a total of fifteen minutes overall — thirty seconds here; 45 seconds there; a couple of minutes further down the line. Come to think of it, I wonder how many of the 43.1 million who supposedly watched this year's Oscarcast actually sat through the whole three-hour-thirty-minute thing. Or even half of it. Or a third.
I was disappointed — but hardly surprised — that none of the Hurt Locker filmmakers mentioned the people of Iraq or the election held in that country on Sunday. Kathryn Bigelow dedicated her Best Director award to "the women and men in the military who risk their lives on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world." When she came back to receive a second Oscar statuette for co-producing the year's Best Picture winner she once again made a dedication "to men and women all over the world who … wear a uniform, but even not just the military – HazMat, emergency, firemen. They're there for us and we're there for them."
Unfortunately, the filmmaker who made the most talked-about movie about the Iraq War to date made no mention of the Iraqi people and what they had to go through as a result of a war on which they had no say. US military personnel had the option of declaring themselves conscientious objectors. The people of Iraq had no such choice. But ignoring the plight of the Iraqis is typical whenever most people or news publications discuss matters over there; but typical or not, it's unjustifiable. (Figures for Iraqi deaths are at best iffy, ranging from 100,000 to 1 million people, in addition to 2 million refugees.)
The closest to an acknowledgment — if it can be interpreted that way — that there is more to the war in Iraq than the experiences of Americans over there was screenwriter-producer Mark Boal's reply to a journalist backstage, when he expressed his hope that "there are many more movies and documentaries and articles and discussion on Iraq, and also in Afghanistan, because these are extremely important historical moments that need to be explored by artists."
But according to the Academy's transcripts, Boal made no mention of the Iraqi elections or the Iraqis themselves. Nor did Bigelow or fellow The Hurt Locker producer Greg Shapiro while interviewed backstage.
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