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"  I grew up, like everybody with any sense, hating the Oscars. In 1994, the Academy selected Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction for Best Picture and that was really the end. It&amp;#039;s not so much that I disapproved of that choice, but that I was incapable of imagining an aesthetic universe in which such a choice was even a possibility. There was also the fact that Rocky won Best Picture in 1976 and Raging Bull was denied it in 1980 (although Raging Bull lost to Ordinary People, which is a great film). And this year, I&amp;#039;m upset again, because The Master \u2014 a film people will be talking about decades from now \u2014 isn&amp;#039;t even on the list of nominees. For eighty-five years, the Academy has failed at its self-appointed task of picking the best movie. The Oscars do offer insight into something more important than good taste, however. They are a window into the state of public morality.  The winner of Best Picture is the surest barometer for establishing what Americans consider to be upright and virtuous during any given year. I don&amp;#039;t mean good in the sense of well-made or beautiful or strong. I mean good as opposed to evil. That alone explains how Rocky wins, but not Raging Bull. Raging Bull is one of the greatest movies ever made about male violence, and it also contains one of the greatest examples of physical acting ever put down on film. In short, a masterpiece. Rocky was written in a week by Sylvester Stallone. But Rocky is about triumph over adversity and the American Dream, while Raging Bull is about the complexity of life. Every Best Picture winner has a moral core that fits its time perfectly.  Don&amp;#039;t misunderstand me: Sometimes great movies win. The Godfather won Best Picture, not because it was the greatest gangster film ever made, but because it captured the paranoia of 1972 perfectly. The idea that the world was run by nefarious forces that pulled all the strings was a virtuous idea in 1972. When The Godfather Part II won in 1974, it was a film about the triumph of the immigrant experience, which was also a virtuous idea. The key to winning Best Picture is to keep this virtue as simple as possible. The definitive Oscar Best Picture is Schindler&amp;#039;s List. That film&amp;#039;s message boils down to this: The mass slaughter of Jews is bad. Stanley Kubrick once said that the Holocaust was about six million people who died and Schindler&amp;#039;s List was about six hundred people who lived. Exactly. That is the formula for Oscar success. Which is why Lincoln \u2014 a film about slavery which is also about white people talking amongst themselves \u2014 is one of the two clear frontrunners this year. It falls neatly into the tradition of Gandhi and Platoon and Rain Man.       Unusual choices for Best Picture are particularly revealing, however, though I doubt we&amp;#039;ll get one this year. My favorite Oscar moment of all time was Jack Nicholson unable to keep his amazement in check when Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash (see above). He had assumed that anti-homophobia trumped racial alienation. He was wrong. Occasionally, even art can become virtuous. That&amp;#039;s why Martin Scorsese didn&amp;#039;t win for the series of unspeakably brilliant movies he made, from Taxi Driver through Goodfellas, but he won for The Departed in 2006. Nobody could say that The Departed was his best film, or indeed that it was a particularly virtuous film, but it had to win because the story of Martin Scorsese&amp;#039;s denial over all that time had made him irresistably virtuous.  The penchant for virtue doesn&amp;#039;t just afflict the Oscars, either. The Nobel Prize in Literature is just as bad. Tolstoy never won, but Selma Lagerl\u00F6f, the author of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, did. Joyce didn&amp;#039;t win. Neither did Kafka, nor Virginia Woolf, and on and on. These writers weren&amp;#039;t particularly uplifting people. They didn&amp;#039;t write virtuous books. Borges couldn&amp;#039;t win. He had his photo taken with a dictator once, so he was right out. They were just great artists. Harold Pinter could win because he became politically radical in his dotage. Maybe Philip Roth will see the light, move to Europe, and become unbearably self-righteous. Then he&amp;#039;ll have a shot. But it wouldn&amp;#039;t be because he wrote American Pastoral.  I&amp;#039;m sick of hating the Oscars. It&amp;#039;s juvenile, and besides, there&amp;#039;s no point to it. It&amp;#039;s like going to a NASCAR race and complaining that the clothes aren&amp;#039;t very tasteful. Every year, at an elaborate ceremony watched by nearly a billion people, the Academy reveals exactly what people think is good. Surely that&amp;#039;s more important than deciding what&amp;#039;s a great movie.  Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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