Not Giving the Oscar Audience the Finger

    Did you notice, in the Academy Awards montage of decades of Oscar-winning foreign films, that the Academy had to pander to the lowest priggish denominator, and the FCC, even for a flash of a moment?

    It wasn’t on the screen even long enough for me to recognize the film, but in the scene, the character was extending a middle finger -- and the Academy producers digitized the digit. They scrambled the image so you wouldn’t see the flip-off finger, even though anatomically that was the only finger it could be, and even though everyone who’s completed second grade has seen that gesture.

  Pitiful.

  I watched the Oscars in the company of a two-time Academy Award winner, the nephew of an Oscar winner, the son of a renowned British actor, and sundry creative folk, and amid all the joshing and droll commentary, everyone fell silent during the montage of Oscar-winning foreign films of the past.

    They were so stunning, so simple, so human and humane, that you couldn’t help thinking how many of the American-made ‘’best pictures’’ would fare in comparison. It isn’t about the quality of the acting, it’s about the scale and the message of the American winners: big-sweep blockbuster pictures about war and gore and crime, and the musicals and spectacles … and not very often thoughtful, intimate, complex films about the passions and joys and torments of ordinary life.

     Maybe it’s a case of huge Hollywood budgets fueling the drive to make huge motion pictures, and maybe it’s a function of a big industry in a big and important country making movies to match its brawn. But oh, ``La Strada,’’ ``Black Orpheus,’’ ``A Man and a Woman,’’ ``Closely Watched Trains,’’ ``Z’’ –  if there were an international trade deficit for brilliant, award-winning small films, Hollywood would be up to its neck in red ink of its own making, or unmaking.