At their best, movies either reflect the truth about our lives or provide an escape from our lives. 

Both are necessary and, together, for me, they reflect the yin and yang of my sanity.

But right now I’m doing a lot more yanging than I am yinging.

Meaning the push and pull between what’s real (Note: The yang) and fake (Note: The ying), aka which of those worlds I want to play in at any given moment, has become head-spinning at best.

The Oscar nominations were announced this week, an event I look forward to every year because it brings me back to a time of childhood innocence; when I thought winning would solve everything for me and I, in turn, would help solve the problems of the world.

And no, I’m not kidding.

But they were upstaged by the continued crumbling of actual American freedoms on the streets of Minneapolis, supercharged to a head when masked ICE officers tackled and murdered a 37-year-old ICU nurse as he was trying to help a young woman they had knocked to the ground and pepper-sprayed.

Once the “supercharging” happened, a mere 24-hours after Sinners became the most Oscar-nominated film in Academy Awards history – well, I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s been hard to focus. 

What to do —

Say the name of Alex Pretti over and over again and show and tell his story to anyone who will listen because, in my mind, unless we do at least that we will all be next?

Or –

Take some much-needed me time to discuss not only why there are now TEN best picture nominees instead of five (Note: Like day camp, everyone gets a participation trophy?), but how the hell F1 got on that list.

This is not to say that focusing on this year’s Oscar nominees is not reflective of the world at large and the various hot button issues faced in the U.S. in particular.

The two leading contenders alone are so timely they’re literally less than half a step away from prescient.

Sinners is a brilliantly evocative dissection of white American vampirism  (Note: Both literally and figuratively) in one Jim Crow South community that was wrought so originally, disturbingly and even musically by writer-director Ryan Coogler that its crossed over into mainstream blockbuster status and will soon have earned over $400 million worldwide.

And Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a black comedy, thriller, father-daughter story of a corrupt military hunting down Americans they don’t deem American enough, starting with brown-skinned immigrants and liberals, could literally be evidence that PTA has a crystal ball somewhere were it not partially based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland.

That book explored what happens to a small California town still steeped in freedom-loving 1960s counterculture during the anything but, and ultra-conservative, Reagan era of the 1980s.

Talk about art imitating life, life imitating art and the never-ending ouroboros of it all.

The sad truth of the matter is that like the 1960s Vietnam era, the government is still massaging the truth for the masses and asking us to believe that protesting governmental violence in the streets is a crime punishable by death (Note: I was a kid when Kent State happened but I still remember that Time Magazine cover of innocent college students being gunned down by a trigger-happy American military fed up with the audacity of those choosing to protest, or even be in the vicinity of one.

What’s different now is that unlike that time, when we had to depend on a handful of intrepid still photographers or news cameras, anyone can record the goings-from every angle by merely pushing a button on their cell phone.  (Note: And do).

So instead of arguing the nuances of fact, the powers-that-be deny the reality of millions of pixels courtesy of thousands of Apple devices and tell us Alex Pretti was brandishing his hand gun when it’s clear as Reagan’s dye job that he was holding his iPhone up with one hand and gallantly using the other to help a woman in distress.

Though if you’ve ever spent any time around ICU nurses, as I have in the last ten years, you’d know they’d pretty much help anyone.  Especially Alex, who spent many hundreds of hours at a Minneapolis V.A. hospital prolonging the lives of military men, not shooting them.

Lying, of course, is not limited to government men like Greg Bovino, our current U.S. Customs and Border Chief, who came out and gave a press conference before Alex Pretti’s body was cold, unequivocally stating Alex “..was brandishing a gun and planned to massacre law enforcement..” despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Many, many decades ago it was Pablo Picasso who also let the cat out of the bag about all of us creative types, big and small, when he famously proclaimed:

Art is the lie that tells the truth.

Still, the very nature of the arts is that we make stuff in order to make people think, or give them relief from thinking too much.  We proudly tell you it’s a fictional interpretation of the truth so you can admire, or even loathe us, even more (Note: if that’s possible).

What we don’t do is make up a lie about the actual truth and then claim it is what literally happened. We’d never disrespect our audience that much.

Or, well, most of us wouldn’t.

Because I can argue Sinners’ 16 Oscar nominations is not really an entirely true record, as the Academy of Motion Picture ARTS and Sciences so publicly claims.

All Above Eve (1950) the previous record-holder at 14 noms, along with Titanic (1977) and La La Land (2016), was released in an era where there was NO CATEGORY for either makeup and hairstyling  OR casting.

Now are you doing to tell me that Margo Channing’s hair and makeup and the casting of a young, unknown Marilyn Monroe practically stealing a scene from Bette Davis and the rest of the cast, would not be enough to land that film TWO more nominations in those categories?

I didn’t think so.

And that would at least make it a tie, at 16-16.

As A.I. emerges, with the power of our new MAGA tolerant/supporting Tech Oligarch class, my fear is that pretty soon we won’t be able to distinguish the subtle gray areas of issues far more important.

That The Lie will be The Art and it will Tell Everything… But the Truth.

And the majority of us will be onboard with it simply to survive.

Huntr/x – “Golden” (from KPop Demon Hunters)