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"  Sure, Hollywood is understandably agog over the recent success of Alice in Wonderland, which has grossed nearly $450 million worldwide in its first two weeks in theaters. But when it comes to blockbuster tea parties, there might be an even more lucrative one coming shortly after Obama signs The Bill this weekend. And Fox News and its Tinseltown-thwacking can stop the grilling, because they&amp;#039;re gonna love it.  I&amp;#039;m talking, of course, about that other Tea Party the &amp;quot;code-red&amp;quot; insurgency against the fiscal excesses and social constraints of the United States government. Often dismissed by its critics as too paranoid, fractious, and/or disorganized to have any influence beyond the echoes of its outrage, the movement has one unmistakable quality going for it: a zeitgeist. When you read stories of thousand-person rallies and grandmothers learning Twitter and Facebook for maximum anti-Obama effect, you can&amp;#039;t help but acknowledge the abject sense of commitment, however ill-informed, volatile, or Voightian. Tea Party ideology owes as much to pure mobility as it does to whatever the hell the IRS or Congress or any other allegedly egregious Washington body is doing wrong today. While it might sound like a stretch, it has everything in common with the obsession fanning Twilight or Harry Potter across the culture, regardless of whether the movies themselves are good or even watchable. And don&amp;#039;t think for a minute that studio executives a self-loathing, paranoiac species if ever there were one haven&amp;#039;t noticed the same parallel. Historically, they&amp;#039;ve left the marketplace for morally reinforced and/or right-leaning fare to indie producers who&amp;#039;ve long thrived in the margins. But now, with The Blind Side&amp;#039;s commercial success and Oscar win making the mainstream safe for perky, preachy Christian conservatives, and with The Hurt Locker honored as a sympathetic, apolitical, and relatively accurate glimpse at duress and duty in Iraq, Hollywood is at a significant crossroads: Does it cling to its insularity and with it, the industry&amp;#039;s traditional role as the liberal-elite b\u00EAte noire of the right or do the moguls on the coasts hold their noses and dive into the action in the middle?  Come on: If there&amp;#039;s anything the film industry loves more than millions of sitting ducks quacking the same easy-to-meet demand, it&amp;#039;s the opportunity to Be Important. And studios don&amp;#039;t even have to really align themselves with Tea Party politics so as much as reflect both at once and for once a we-get-it perspective that speaks to the Tea Party ethos. Think more G.I. Joe and less Green Zone, whose action thriller-meets-war critique bombed last weekend. Think more of films like this summer&amp;#039;s Iron Man 2, with its charismatic capitalist hero (a weapons manufacturer, natch) swatting away a meddlesome government that wants a claim to his private enterprise. (Also, make the villain Russian. Socialism sells, baby!) And definitely think more good-guy mercenary epics like this year&amp;#039;s The A-Team and The Expendables, with their hat-tips to do-it-yourself justice and literally going rogue. At heart, these movies already rely on a certain familiarity that is the quintessence of conservative thought. Between the franchise entry, the TV revival, and the return again of creaky, bulky old skull-cracker Sylvester Stallone, the studios evince their own enduring reluctance to change. They&amp;#039;re like the old lady cited in that sweeping Tea Party profile last month in the Times the one clutching a copy of the Constitution and insisting she was &amp;quot;prepared to lay down her life to protect it from the likes of Mr. Obama.&amp;quot; Most movie bosses would no doubt do the same thing to defend their development slates against anything resembling an original idea, which has a lot to do with why the Academy Awards the very embodiment of holier-than-thou Left Coast moral superiority now routinely dole out hardware to films made outside the studio system.   But even the Academy came to Jesus, so to speak, in recognizing The Blind Side. (While the Tea Party movement is perceived to be mostly secular and maybe even a threat to the GOP&amp;#039;s evangelical power base, early signs point to a substantial faith-based constituency.) The expanded Best Picture category made the hit a natural fit for the wider Oscars audience that the Academy wanted to court, and it was white-guilty enough to pass muster among voters. Forgive me that bit of inside baseball, because the consequences are hugely important: Those voters didn&amp;#039;t realize Sandra Bullock&amp;#039;s character isn&amp;#039;t just an avatar of compassion and humanity. She&amp;#039;s a self-righteous folk-hero prototype a kind of litmus test to see if the subculture that responds positively to the likes of Sarah Palin (a self-described pit bull with lipstick) and California&amp;#039;s GOP senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina (a self-described &amp;quot;five-foot-six-inch fireball&amp;quot;) would translate to the movies. Now we know, and love it or hate it, expect more where that came from.  But the movement has impacted more than just what you see on-screen. Maybe my favorite example of Tea Party-style tinkering was just announced by Paramount Pictures, whose new &amp;quot;Insurge&amp;quot; label will produce a minimum of ten films made for $100,000 each a radical fiscal conservatism unheard of in Hollywood. Moreover, they&amp;#039;ll generally be marketed virally, once again enacting the modes of grass-roots populism that pumped the studio&amp;#039;s micro-budget Paranormal Activity to blockbuster status last year. In recognizing the era&amp;#039;s new economic and social realities right down to the &amp;quot;Insurge&amp;quot; brand Paramount has undertaken its own rebellion against the bloated status quo. The only way to push it any further would be to make one of these movies a little satirical horror effort called Death Panels. The multiplex would freaking burst.   For the most part, though, expect a slower transition with much more expensive, obvious milestones along the way. You&amp;#039;ll get the hypernationalism of Captain America (left), or the border-defending implications of Battleship, or more of Michael Bay&amp;#039;s jingoistic good-and-evil toy orgies in Transformers 3. They&amp;#039;re all coming soon, just conceptually retrograde enough for film executives to be able to sleep at night but also just politically aware enough to capitalize on the modern moment. On the one hand, I wonder if Tea Partiers or conservatives in general will even notice or appreciate the change. On the other I wonder if guys like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh aren&amp;#039;t already too far gone in their predisposition to regard Hollywood as the profligate, smog-choked Sodom and Gomorrah of our time. Just as easily, the studios could lose their nerve and the whole experiment will crash. We&amp;#039;ll see. Either way, we&amp;#039;ll always have Alice in Wonderland. S.T. VanAirsdale is a senior editor at Movieline.com. His film criticism and industry analysis have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, the Huffington Post, Defamer, and The Reeler, which he founded. Get More on America&amp;#039;s Cultural Crossroads &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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