https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w7FjW3QeiQ

“Only in America,” I’d mutter to myself. The greed, the sales-drunk shoppers camping out in parking lots and then pouring through the front doors of Walmart like some sort of flesh tsunami, all stampeding and thundering down the aisles ripping discounted toasters and Xboxes from one another as if on some demented, nightmare game show, seemed parodic, a bit of cinema constructed for a dystopian movie and not a regular, predictable part of American life. It was the sort of theatre that always made me feel morally superior, cozy and safe in the knowledge that I would never behave in such a desperate, quasi-apocalyptic manner.

Of course, all I was really doing was sneering at poor people. Feasting on a genre of poverty porn, I would pat myself on the back, fashioning some sort of moral virtue out of what was actually snobbery and a glaring lack of empathy.

These videos that are so roundly circulated and mocked, may depict the results of greed, but not as personified by the unmediated appetite of the mob on the floor. No, the greed is taking place off-camera, up in the offices and towers of Walmart (which as a corporation makes about 16 billion a year in profit and pays it’s typical full-time employee less than $25,000 a year). The scrabbling peasants rioting beneath, their behaviour is the product of exclusion, of living in an aggressively consumer culture where material ascension must never yield.

Lacking sufficient funds to live the mythic “American Dream,” people who are working really hard just to survive, must wake up each day feeling like they’re missing out. In a nation where it’s said that the average child can identify 1,000 corporate logos and people are constantly bombarded, concussed, really, with messages that the good life is a narrative expressed largely through class, what hope do we truly have of feeling satisfied with what we have? If we get more stuff, we’ll be better off, is the message, and if you’re poor you’re relegated to live in an acutely felt state of deprivation while an inaccessible and teasing world glitters all around.

It’s nothing to laugh at, and as a culture we’re finally starting to understand that.

That’s an awful lot.

Obviously, this has nothing much to do with the quality of the films and everything to do with the marketing of the films. In order to feel invested and fully participatory in the event, we, as audience, go out to see as many nominees as possible– even if the movie happens to be Lincoln. It’s kind of like Black Friday for movies, only without discounts. What’s particularly funny about this cynical display is that one of the prime motivators for the audience in seeing the movies is to simply confirm  that we have MUCH better taste than the Academy. In fact, we will later Live-Tweet about what a horrible, self-congratulatory and vulgar spectacle it all is. But of course, we end up paying them for the privilege of doing so, rendering the ironies so plentiful that it actually gets tiring to think about them.

No matter, this year, the movie that most people are expecting to win for Best Picture is Argo. The film, for those of you who haven’t seen it, is based on the rescue of six US diplomats during the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979.

Personally, I think that the movie is fine and little more. The one thing that really stood out for me was the opening, a graphic novel kind of prologue in which the historical background for the movie was efficiently and elegantly set. I’d give them an award for that, but for the rest?

Meh.

But Argo probably will win.

Here’s why:

First off, the Academy has always favoured the historical, and this one is appealingly set in an era that all Academy members can vividly recall (they’re at the center of history!)– so for them the movie is kind of like flipping through an old high school yearbook. It’s a story told through the experience of white people, about the vulnerability of white people isolated by impenetrable dark-skinned people, getting rescued by white people.

In short, Argo champions idealized versions of the audience that’s watching the film.  This is a relatively typical Oscar construct though and should be considered practically boilerplate. Where Argo really scores with Academy voters is in embedding Hollywood into the core of the story.

In Argo, for this whole scheme to work, the CIA has to recruit Hollywood to make a fake film, one that will serve as cover so that the hostages can be rescued. Suddenly, people working in Hollywood get to see themselves in a kind of romantic, even noble light. Competent, funny and successful, they have brash, cynical exteriors, but pure hearts. Working in secrecy behind the scenes and out-smarting everyone they meet with impressive sangfroid, they’re the coolest people in the room—the work they’re doing important, rather than self-serving and shallow. And this speaks directly to the Academy voter, allowing them to imagine themselves  in the best possible light, so yes, if I had to bet, I would bet on Argo for Best Picture.