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Okay, I feel like I should apologize for posting this so soon after another Armond White post, but my whole shtick of being an unapologetic Armond White whore would go out the window if I apologized.  So I won’t.  Nyah-nyah-nyah.

White wrote an incredibly concise and compelling article on March 3rd about how the Oscars are irrelevant.  One of his primary points was that Kathryn Bigelow is already an important, vital filmmaker whether or not she wins an Oscar.  He points out that she’s already worked her way into the pop lexicon by making films like Point Break, which obviously have some staying power, because filmmakers like Edgar Wright are referencing them with comprehension more than a decade later.

His observation that Hurt Locker “has gotten her heroized as an exceptional American female filmmaker through way-late feminism. The Hurt Locker lets the liberal media have both its Iraq War statement and female tokenism.”  I’m not sure how this meme evolved, but I guess it’s inevitable, considering the way the Academy tends to award its Oscars.  The conceit that the Oscars are a form of tokenism — politically convenient tools of recognizing career work, or perhaps a way of setting milestones, regardless of the quality of the work — has been around for years.  For months, it was suggested that Bigelow was likely to win best director by virtue of the fact that it’s high time that the Oscar go to a woman.  It was further suggested that this would undermine the actual merit of her work.  There’s logic in that. Read the rest of this entry »