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...question, The Hurt Locker is a near perfect war film and an excellent choice for Best Picture. Bigelow's job wrangling this orphan project into shape, and her shot-by-shot mastery of the story, should be considered no less impressive than her swaggering hero's effectiveness in defusing bombs on Baghdad streets. The same goes for Mark Boal's winning screenplay, based on his reporting for a Playboy nonfiction piece about IED squads (which really should have put the script in the Best Adapted Screenplay category). (See pictures of James Cameron's special effects...
...Hurt Locker's Oscar haul had less to do with the movie's merits than with the Academy membership's make-up and mind-set. Remember, to win Best Picture you don't have to make the best picture; you have to make the picture that appeals to the voters, who are older, politically liberal and artistically conservative. Here's how those and other factors may have played in The Hurt Locker's favor - and doomed Avatar...
...Shock of the New. Not to generalize about old people, like the typical Academy member, but every one of them is resistant to change or novelty. Anything new in movies seems less like progress and more like a renunciation of the artistic standards they were nurtured on. Consider that in 1942, the Academy gave its top awards, Best Picture and Director, to John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, a poignant evocation of a Welsh mining town. Fine, honorable, fully worthy. The film it beat: Citizen Kane. Who needs all those low-angle shots, the deep-focus cinematography...
...visit for the New York Times, contributes to Slate and the Huffington Post, stars in Beliefnet videos, and comments frequently for both CNN and NPR. He's written a brace of previous books including the hagiographic memoir My Life with the Saints, which has sold 100,000 copies. Less predictably, after advising on a production about Judas, he became a member of the off-Broadway LAByrinth Theater Company, attending readings and participating in exercises. Says Philip Seymour Hoffman, the Oscar winner and LAByrinth co-founder, referring to the company's eclectic religious mix, "people might have preconceptions about [clergy...
...Failing to Empower Cabinet Members on Domestic Policy. Obama has put numerous talented people in his Cabinet, from a Nobel Prize winner to several successful governors, but like his predecessor, he has no system to get the most out of them. Cabinet members in the domestic-policy cluster have less input, and less of a platform, in determining and selling Administration policies than their counterparts at State and Defense. Finding the right balance - giving the domestic Cabinet enough influence, but not too much - is tough, but Obama, like Bush, has placed too little weight on the side of the Secretaries...