We just had the Oscars this past weekend and perhaps it is revealing that Birdman received top honors in so many categories and Selma was honored only with a torch song. The obvious criticism is that the Academy is self-centered, and interested in stories about life in the movie business. The same weekend and without nearly as much attention outside its own country, France had the Césars ceremony, where one film also vastly outshone all others, but of an entirely different nature. Timbuktu was a co-production between France and Mauritania, and focuses on life forever changed by Islamic extremists. This more accurately reflects life in our world than one where men fly.
At the Oscars, Timbuktu was lumped with the other "foreign films". But really, Ida had to win; just as 12 Years a Slave had to win last year. It's America's strange place in the world; between Israel and Palestine the US will always choose Israel, because we are a nation of more Jewish immigrants than Arabic immigrants, and so many people of Jewish heritage run our great institutions: banks, jewelers, films, delis that we feel guilty, that we're "letting them down".
France, on the other hand, is in the opposite situation. With more Arabic immigrants and record numbers of Jews fleeing to Israel, it truly struggles to deal with populations who want to display their religion in a country which keeps trying to tell everyone not to mix up religion and matters of state.
CitizenFour and American Sniper represent America's situation, but it's hard to know if everyone could tell the difference between the heroic filming of the documentary and the controlled filming of the "heroic story". It will be interesting to see which topics are covered next and chosen by Hollywood's elite to represent the "best" in American cinema.
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