And the Oscar Goes to... Fascism!

Vlad is exceptionally intelligent, but he may not be aware that Asian men have testicles. Vlad is 23 years old, and I'd be surprised if he knew that Latinos even existed. The Ukrainian village from which he recently moved-courtesy of a full scholarship and travel fare to Manhattanville-was forced to replace its cinema with a t-shirt factory when Vlad was a child. At that point, his access to visual representations of the outside world became limited to Russian television and a small assortment of videocassettes, most of which hailed from Hollywood.

The few films he's been afforded have imbued him with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of cowboys, mafiosos, soldiers, and the various other archetypes with which white men wish to be represented, but the only black man he's seen get the girl used to be the Fresh Prince. He can mimic John Wayne down to his groin-oriented strut, but his imitation of John Cho leaves a bit to be desired. Vlad may never have been to America, but America had certainly been to him.

Though my assessment of Vlad's lack of multi-cultural sophistication is certainly exaggerated, the extent to which the controlling images of American movies have worked to inform his impressions is terrifying. The American heritage of global cinematic hegemony is not a foreign concept to most of us, but Hollywood's calculated pervasiveness cannot be underestimated. We've sent Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Carrey into untold destinations so remote that the actors themselves don't know they exist. If the American film industry were the segregated complex that so many assume it to be, black, white, yellow, red, and pink cinemas would compete for global influence. But as it stands, green wins every time.

Racial tensions aren't as profitable as archetypal heroes, so American films tend to reduce obligatory hints of otherness to the periphery, often in service to the protagonist's virility and social graces. Moreover, whenever a film does feature a minority of any narrative prominence, it does so only by fostering another dominant perspective-it's no accident that Beyonce has made a career of being a doofy white guy's exotic conquest. To that end, if you took a shot every time you spotted a black man in Goldmember, by the closing credits you'd have the blood-alcohol level of an AA meeting.

Unfortunately, despite Hollywood's aversion to subtlety, my history lesson is (somewhat) less superfluous than it may seem, particularly when Vlad's perspective is factored into the equation. Even in the overstated form in which I presented it, Vlad's ignorance is made less alarming because the blatant insularity of his adolescence conditioned him to ask the right questions. His Ukrainian upbringing, having lacked the egocentricity of American culture, taught him to achieve worldliness rather than assume it.

Inevitably, such a thought reminds me of this weekend's Academy Awards. Uncharacteristically inundated with the under-represented, the nominated films largely provide responsible looks at homosexuality, transsexuality, Jews, Palestinians, and a number of other contingents at odds with White America's controlling images.

Yet the focus that critical acclaim has afforded these movies has had an illuminating and counterintuitive effect. As a means of influence, cultural hegemony must first achieve domestic subversion if it hopes to succeed at tainting the international community, and the films vying for this year's Oscars have revealed the distressing extent to which we have ourselves to blame for the universally detrimental representations popularized by our cinema.

Despite the amnesic hubbub over Brokeback Mountain, I've found Munich, Crash, and Paradise Now to be the most revealing nominees (seriously, some of Howard Hawks' cowboys almost combusted, they were so flaming). For one, the anti-Palestinian fervor the United States has actively cultivated over the past half century lead otherwise intelligent Jews to woefully misinterpret Steven Spielberg's morally challenging masterpiece-my dad felt that the film's message was simply, "Don't fuck with the Jews."

Likewise, petitions that derided Paradise Now's "justification of suicide bombings" have been flooding my inbox for months, as some Americans have been so indoctrinated by our dogmatic visual media that they instantly reduce a plea for critical thought into a freedom-hating piece. Paradise Now may lack the narrative grace of a deserving Oscar-winner, but its victory would be a temporary cease-fire in the Academy's long war against ambivalence, which began in 1941 when Citizen Kane lost to the patriotic theatrics of John Ford's How Green Was My Valley. Given the confused responses of our nation's most renowned critics and beloved citizens (and my dad), it's no wonder that those in power would be reluctant to confront even the most damaging of archetypes. Munich is the only best picture nominee to come from a major studio, and even that film was only possible because of Spielberg's anomalous power.

It's the celebration of Paul Haggis' Crash, however, that is most indicative of the problem at hand. As a film, Crash is merely a relentless plea to our national affection for mediocrity, but as a barometer of our cross-cultural well-being, it's downright disturbing. Haggis derails his narrative time and again to be more all-encompassing and still manages to almost ignore the Asian-American population. That America has so widely championed his urban fable for its aggressively diverse cast and laborious racial acknowledgment is indicative of the extent to which dominant representations have been domestically condoned.

Everything Crash says, "Ebony and Ivory" said first, but American dollars have empowered controlling images for so long that some feel as if Haggis is the Darwin of this young century. Though designed to be a primer for people like Vlad, Crash's success only informs such culturally constricted foreigners that Americans are right where Hollywood wants them-light years behind were we need to be. And the Oscars are perennial reminders of that sad fact, as the deceptively encompassing Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences includes the best foreign picture category, the nominees of which are eligible for best picture, but have never claimed the prize itself! Only in a world where Mel Gibson has more Oscars than Akira Kurosawa, Abbas Kiarostami, and Luis Bunuel combined, could Roger Ebert, despite his exposure to the wise works of Spike Lee and Wayne Wang, deem Crash an achievement. The sad thing is, he may be right.

David Ehrlich is a Columbia College junior majoring in film.