The Globe Goes, But 'The Passion' Remains

And how do we know this? Well, according to this story from NewsMax.com, in a year that saw the second straight drop in box-office revenues, Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ earned $370 million domestically, out of $1.53 billion in total box-office receipts: twenty-four percent of the total. And yet Hollywood refuses to nominate Passion for anything.

Govindini Murty, the column's author, points out that in Hollywood's glory days, Oscar trophies and nominations commonly went to films that were both critically acclaimed and popular. I would add this: Back then, it amounted to something even to be nominated for an Oscar, and a film that won one of the Major Oscars (Best Picture, Best Actor/Actress, Best Director, and, if you like, Best Supporting Actor/Actress) would typically win a bunch of them, or even all of them. Ben-Hur, for example, won eleven Oscars--a record that would stand until Titanic came along, and even then it was a tie.

These days, very often the Best Picture will not be the one directed by the Best Director, or led by the Best Actor or Actress. But more than that, most of the time, you never heard of the winners except for all the liberal buzz.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was the last exception, of course--and it probably won every Oscar that its prequels had coming, because everybody knew that those three films were really one film in three parts. And the only reason why it found distributors is that it was not an explicitly Christian film. J. R. R. Tolkien, bless his heart, invented a Celtic mythos to replace the Celtic myths whose records the invading Angles, Saxons, and Jutes destroyed. And while I found much to like in the whole Middle Earth epic, I cannot in the end accept the polytheism, the magic arts, the occultic themes (like the One Ring as the Grand-daddy of all Reliquaries), and the history that cannot possibly be true or have any real-world counterpart.

The Bible is at least as rich as, if not richer than, all of Tolkien's notes and novels. But only when Republicans ran things did you ever get any epics based on the Bible. John Huston did set out to make a series of epics telling the whole story of the Bible, but he got no further than the first film, that told the story from creation to the near-sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. (John Huston as Noah and George C. Scott as Abraham are two performances that are not to be missed.) Even when Jeffrey Katzenberg decided to remake The Ten Commandments as an animated cartoon, he made worse errors than Cecil B. DeMille did. (The worst omission was failure to recount the Golden Calf Incident; The Prince of Egypt implied that everything was hunky-dory after the Red Sea crossing.)

Passion is the best Biblical epic since The Greatest Story Ever Told, though I won't vouch for any of the non-Scriptural interpolations. Still, Hollywood has left itself no grounds for rejecting that film as Academy Award material. Face it: the Oscars have turned into a left-wing political show. We're about to go through another period, like that of the 1970's, when no Academy Award-winning title was even worth having in your library, from Patton to Amadeus.