Why Babel Should Win Best Picture (and Why it Even Matters)

Ok, maybe it doesn't actually matter. It's just Hollywood, and they're just movies, and life goes on. But tonight, if Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel wins, it will get that inevitable best-picture boost in sales that comes with the top award, because tons of people will rush to see it.

And why do I care how much money the producers will make if more people see their movie?

Because Babel, which is mostly stunning photographs interlaced with even more stunning performances, is the answer to the hit-you-over-the-head moral films with global messages that the New York Times' Manohla Dargis recently criticized and that we are becoming decreasingly receptive to. The movies that are not making the impact they should be; those whose obvious pleas for compassion have desensitized us. We are in need of a new template, because we need to be moved--because the rest of the world is out there hoping we remember to care.

Those message movies, like last year's Crash or this year's Blood Diamond, aren't ridding the world of racism or of problem diamonds (which, as is incredibly clear from the movie, are a rich man's indulgence that stupidly damage and destroy entire nation's populations). It could be a white racist cop running in slow motion to rescue a black woman from a burning car in Los Angeles or a man in Sierra Leone being violently separated from his family in a country divided into rebel factions fueled by the diamond trade--these images are supposed to stir something in us that will make us a little bit less prejudiced, or at least go out and get a cubic zirconia engagement ring.

But it's not really happening. The medium of powerful images that was once able to catalyze man's reaction to pain or injustices in faraway places is no longer as, well, powerful. The role of those images that made our era of human rights possible has changed.

As the late Susan Sontag writes in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others, there was a turning point in history when photographs, especially war photographs, made "real (or 'more real') matters that the merely safe and privilege might prefer to ignore." She writes about the contemporary belief that I'm mirroring from Manohla Dargis, that the hyper-saturation of images has made us become more callous. But she is skeptic of this idea, and writes,

As much as they create sympathy, I wrote [in my book On Photography], photographs shrivel sympathy. Is this true? I thought it was when I wrote it. I'm not so sure now. What is the evidence that photographs have a diminishing impact, that our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities?

Her evidence is everywhere, in a culture where images of genocide, extreme hunger, and even the dehumanization of another human being can be seen anywhere from news on sudan to youtube videos about American citizens volunteering to militantly look for illegal immigrants at the border--and which we watch and almost accept comfortably on our couch and shiny macbook screens.

But it might not even be our fault.

As Manola Darghis writes, "it is exhausting having your conscience pricked so regularly." So tonight, I hope that the Academy honors a movie that can change this. A movie that doesn't hit you over the head with gore or multitudes of people in pain or hunger, but instead silently and subtly captures the connection between all of us citizens of the earth. Calling us citizens of the earth, I agree, is beyond trite, but what else are we? We all breathe the same air, and as Babel shows in it's storyline that takes place simultaneously in Japan, Mexico, the US, and Morrocco, we can all feel lonely, and guilty, and even completely ambivalent of our own safety for the benefit of others.

It's not easy to find the one character that symbolizes each of those human emotions and drives, though, because that's not the point. We all feel that--all the characters feel that--at one point or another.

Basically, Babel doesn't ask you to accept anyone or anything. It just compels you to consider others. And listen. And maybe that's the kind of film-making that our conscience needs. Maybe it can trick our conscience into perking up without us even noticing. We might be tired and hyper-saturated, but we are beyond privileged, and making the effort to understand, for example, why a Mexican, who has legal permission to cross the border, drives away from the immigration official when he's being harassed for no reason, might be better than sending a check to an organization whose name we can't remember or not doing any thinking about it at all.

Back to the fun part: I know Oscar speculation is almost as exhausting as the ceremony itself (without tivo), and it's pretty much all been said. Supposedly half the Academy voters hate Babel (plus, they say, it's too much like Crash), it's Marty's year, Little Miss Sunshine is the little movie that could, and so on. But even if it doesn't win tonight, it would be ideal if people kept going to the theaters or renting the dvd and, even if the way it all ties together in the end is a little bit far-fetched and it's a little long and a little grandiose in its conception, realize how truly important it is.