Word: citizen
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Wait a minute. Those stuffed turkeys and middling domestic dramas won Best Picture? Yes, they did. All right, we'll try again: ... with such enduring masterpieces as King Kong, The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, Psycho, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Raging Bull ... Oops, sorry again. None of those films won the top Oscar, and half weren't even nominated for Best Picture. But what about the acting categories? Surely Hollywood has recognized its most potent performers. Not always. If this year's nominated actors want to join the exalted ranks of Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Cary Grant, Peter O'Toole...
...Citizen Kane is the definitive litmus test, and Oscar failed it. At the top of nearly every critics' poll as the best film of all time, Orson Welles' debut movie was praised to the skies when it opened in 1941. But the resemblance of Charles Foster Kane to publisher William Randolph Hearst cued a campaign to suppress the movie, and Kane flopped in its initial release. In addition, many in the industry rankled at Welles' boy-genius rep and may have resented the freedom this first-timer was given by his studio, RKO. Under these circumstances, it's probably...
...Year-Old Virgin or Knocked Up would labor under another handicap: it's designed to make people laugh. The top Oscar has gone to a handful of comedies (including It Happened One Night and Annie Hall), but generally the Academy prefers to be edified. The year of Citizen Kane, 1941, was also the year of Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, today regarded as one of the great American comedies, with Stanwyck and Henry Fonda brilliant as a cardsharp predator and her millionaire prey. None of them got even a nomination for this supreme farce...
Even the section devoted entirely to citizen and visa services, the consulate, is little more than the paper-generating hub of this apparatus. They operate mostly like unusually officious post offices with Kalashnikov-armed guards outside. Consulates close unexpectedly on both native and foreign holidays, take long lunch breaks and confiscate your cell phone at the door. And then they turn you away because you’re one dirham short of the ?70 passport renewal fee. Some of the officials who work there, behind the dreary glass screens, are, no doubt, delightful people. But there’s little...
...between our hopes for meaningful government and the pragmatic reality of faceless, centralized administration. Instead of providing informed support (and often despite well-intentioned efforts to do so), governmental bodies are mired in paranoid self-regulation. Because, internally, what really matters to the government is not that the average citizen shouldn’t have to pay $100 to obtain basic travel documents, but that all the correct boxes are checked...