Tom Streithorst argues that the Hurt Locker shouldn't have won the Oscar for best picture because it doesn't portray accurately the war in Iraq:
Before making Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola famously
made a list of all the things that should go into a Vietnam war movie. If I were to make such a list for Iraq, it would include: Egyptian
interpreters who don’t understand Iraqi Arabic and their American bosses
who don’t have a clue they are making up both questions and answers, US
soldiers who spend their entire tour in Iraq never leaving the base,
and grizzled Mississippian truck drivers earning over $100,000 a year
hauling the pork chops and ice cream from Kuwait that feed the troops.
But the most important thing I would include is the casual killing of
innocent Iraqi civilians, not from malice but from fear and
misunderstanding.
Three scenes are absolutely wrong. In one, Sergeant James escapes his
base and roams Baghdad by himself, lost and confused, looking for an
Iraqi he suspects of killing a boy. No, Americans never leave the base
by themselves. In the second, the soldiers wander around their base,
drunk out of their minds. One of the exceptional features of the Iraq
war is it is probably the first war ever fought without alcohol or
drugs. And, in the last and worst, our boys have their guns aimed at an
Iraqi they suspect to be a car bomber. Despite his repeatedly not
obeying their orders to back up, they don’t shoot him, even though they
themselves might die.
I repeat, I have massive admiration for the American soldiers in
Iraq. In my experience they are brave without being brutal. It is an
honorable military: the most honorable and the least vicious I have hung
out with. But its primary ethos is one of limiting US casualties. In
the film, Sergeant James is a cowboy, eager to risk his life, yet ever
careful of not risking the lives of Iraqi civilians. In my experience
this is the wrong way around. The cowboys in the US military are never
reckless with their own or their comrades’ lives, but careless with
those of the Iraqis.
The problem with Streithorst's arguments is that he makes two key and false assumptions. The first is that the most important quality of a movie whether it is about war or anything else is its accuracy, the fact that it portrays what it is meant to portray as it is. One has only to pick a few random movies of the last decade which were deemed to be serious and wonderful to watch to realize that in Hollywood and elsewhere the most important quality is the entertainment value. The second assumption, which renders Streithorst's arguments moot is that he thinks that the Academy, the people voting for the Oscars care about reality, about accuracy and that they are not motivated by other factors, which they consider to be more essential such as politics, commercialism and glamour. The point is that I doubt seriously that the people who voted about the Hurt Locker cared or will care about its inaccuracies and would be shocked to know that reality in Iraq is very different for all that mattered was that the movie felt real to them.
Yep, feelings trump reality!