Asymmetrical Information

Cool!

I linked this on OTB.

BTW--ping weblogs! You're near the bottom of my blogroll right now even though you just posted a few minutes ago. :)

The V sign has been co opted by Palestinians and others. This is an ambiguous gesture from Sarandon.

Seems to me that it was a peace sign more than a v-for-victory.

That is a flat out lie. There was far more applause than boos. Shame on you.

Bones, I didn't see it, but everyone is reporting that Moore was booed loudly.

Uhh... Fred and Frank, I believe that statement was intended to be ironic.

They applauded him when he won the award and walked up on the stage, but when he launched into his polemic it seemed to me that it was way beyond what even the liberals in the audience were willing to stomach and he was loudly booed. I was heartened and frankly surprised that there were enough pro-liberation people in the audience to so clearly and loudly boo him. I think he miscalculated how popular he is and thought he could say ANYTHING and get applauded for it.

We live in fictitious times ... times of fictitious documentaries.

Riiiiight .... so, making a speech that you've been told by the organisers of the Oscars will be drowned out, in front of an audience of industry executives who are incredibly worried about political statements, is a cowardly act, but booing an known loose cannon and outsider who can't get his films financed, when everyone around you is doing the same, that takes real courage? For shame.

The audience booed his self-indulgent ass right off the stage - I saw it twice.

Michael Moore is an embarassment to fat people everywhere.

I saw it. The boos were quite loud, and they weren't "scattered" or "few" or any of the other revisionist words I have been seeing already on some reports.

And please, don't even try the "poor Michael Moore can't get financed" bs. The man just won an Oscar. Millions of people have gone to see his fictition -- excuse me, his "non-fiction" mockumentary. The man obviously got financing from somewhere, and he doesn't live out of a van.

>>And please, don't even try the "poor Michael Moore can't get financed" bs. The man just won an Oscar.

Moore has made two major documentary films, "Roger and Me", which was self-financed and "Bowling for Columbine", financed by a Canadian company. His feature film, "Canadian Bacon", was financed by Polygram of the Netherlands. Despite his proven track record as a documentary filmmaker (admittedly, perhaps also because "Canadian Bacon" wasn't very good), he couldn't get finance in Hollywood for "Bowling for Columbine".

Despite what Jane says, Hollywood is actually quite reluctant to make money if it can only be done by touching difficult political issues.

if we had a good conspiracy, he wouldn't have gotten an oscar, and no one would have printed his work.. obviously we are falling down..

get me VRWC HQ stat!

dsquared, don't you have to go to dailykos and pray for us toops to die or something??

(jane et al.. check out dailykos and indysf for people hoping that troops will die... love the patriotic left)

David Hardy's expose on Moore's piece of fiction deserves wide circulation. It's unfortunate that those who need to read it the most, won't.

I'm not aware that Moore was told his political speech would be cut off, and Moore's politics, and personality are well known. Moore will get financing if the executives think he can make money, and he won't if they don't. His target audience probably enjoyed the speech, so I doubt it will affect his box office. If he had gone up there expecting to get booed, that would be brave. Going up there to express opinions you expect to be warmly applauded is not.

And Bones, I TiVo'd it. The boos are louder than the applause by the time he's into the polemic.

Finally, that was an ironic statement. If Susan Sarandon had the brains God gave a chicken, she'd know that that V is "dual use". She's clearly still stuck in the 60's. Her gesture was courageous, mildly, although somewhat diminished by the air of adolescent defiance. One suspects that's exactly the same gesture she made at her high school graduation.

>>dsquared, don't you have to go to dailykos and pray for us toops to die or something??

My opinions on the character of the kind of person who makes sarcastic references to the deaths of other people in order to slur their political opponents have been quite exhaustively rehearsed on the Internet in recent weeks, so I see no reason to repeat them.

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>>Moore will get financing if the executives think he can make money, and he won't if they don't.

You're just saying this, which is neither going to make it true, nor prove it true if it isn't. In fact (and putting an overgenerous interpretation on things), Moore doesn't get financing from Hollywood companies because they think that financing one of his films is likely to be a negative net present value event for their company. Which is not the same as "his films making money"; my guess is that Hollywood executives (quite possibly correctly) believe that financing Moore's films could cause them sufficient problems in other aspects of their businesses to outweigh the money made on the individual project.

>>If he had gone up there expecting to get booed, that would be brave. Going up there to express opinions you expect to be warmly applauded is not.

Again, you appear to be stating without evidence (or at best, on the evidence of your own interpretation of a facial expression) that Moore expected that there was no risk at all in denouncing a war which had 70% support in opinion polls, less than a week after American troops had been sent into action. Would you at least accept that this is unlikely to convince anyone who was not already looking for reasons to believe that people who oppose the war (or people on the left of politics in general) are cowards? I note in this context that Moore has in the past shown no small degree of physical courage in facing up to security guards.

Moore has made two major documentary films . . .

You misspelled "three." You left out The Big One, which was co-financed by Moore and the BBC. There were also his two television series (remember, this is the man who claims he can't get on TV) which aired on three networks (one of them that well-known bunch of liberals, NBC).

Perhaps it will eventually dawn on Moore that a) Big studios rarely finance documentaries, and when they do, they expect them to be, you know, documentaries, not half-true polemics, and b) The mass audience has demonstrated twice now that they find him to be a tiresome bore.

I can only imagine what went through his mind as he realized that some in the audience had the temerity either to disagree with him, or to think that the Oscars was neither the time nor the place for his routine.

I note in this context that Moore has in the past shown no small degree of physical courage in facing up to security guards.

Despite the fevered dreams of those who believe police and security personnel to be budding fascists, it would be a rare security guard indeed who would want to be caught on camera roughing up a slovenly, out-of-shape filmmaker. I'm quite certain that Moore knows this as well.

One might also note the not-insignificant differences between "facing up to security guards" and "trespassing."

D2, you really should visit the US, it is a really big country. As to your comments:

"Moore expected that there was no risk at all in denouncing a war which had 70% support in opinion polls"

Moore was speaking in west LA and not Memphis, he was surprised by the boos didn't expect them, no honor there.

"I note in this context that Moore has in the past shown no small degree of physical courage in facing up to security guards."

D2, have you ever heard of lawsuits (Moore has), a security guard musses up some of Moore's hair, never mind, you get my drift.

Timmy: give over. In the first place, I unreservedly apologise if I am making an unwarranted assumption, but the USA is indeed a "big place", and I am currently guessing that your personal experience of the inhabitants of "West LA" is about the same as mine; none, and so is your basis for making generalisations. Charlton Heston and Clint Eastwood were both Hollywood stars, and so was Ronald Reagan. It is ludicrous to think that anyone, particularly a left-winger of Moore's particular paranoid stripe who has spent most of his career being nasty about "the media", would have expected a uniformly positive response. You also, like our host, don't seem to be basing your assertion that Moore was "surprised" on anything other than your own interpretation of his facial expressions.

And I still maintain that whatever your views on trespassing, even if you think you can win a lawsuit against a security guard, to refuse to move or stop filming when a burly man tells you not to requires a degree of physical courage. Anyone who's seen "Bowling For Columbine" may recall the scene where Moore is threatened at gunpoint by Terry Nicholls' brother, which I think also supports my point.

There is an mp3 of Moore's speech here:
http://people.ku.edu/~bag/archives/000231.html

FWIW, my wife and I are more-or-less antiwar-inclined, yet we were both appalled and disgusted that the swinish Michael Moore actually WON an Oscar(TM) - what the HELL were the Academy thinking? His asinine screed at his acceptance speech fully deserved to be booed: the people I feel most sorry for were his co-nominees that he invited up with him: talk about "frozen smiles!" I wonder if His Obnoxiousness let them in on his Fiendish Plan? Looks like -NOT - Have any of them had any comments since?
BTW, can Oscars (tm) be revoked?

D2, have lived in west la (albeit for a short period of time), but my point was that a nationwide 70% approval rating don't mean shit in america's various diverse markets.

the fact you actually saw Moore's movie and believed it explains alot.

Give Moore credit for one thing. The Flint Blimp is the world's foremost practitioner of Marxeting - selling pseudo-proletarian fairy tales to the left wing f*ckwit consumer segment. Ron Popeil meets Noam Chomsky, a fat huckster who makes a fortune hawking tinfoil conspiracies to AltWeekly morons.

Forgetting the Moore moment for a second...I still think the best moment of the evening was Barbra Streisand giving the best original song award to Eminem. Love him or hate him, you have to admit that the look of shock on her face (especially following her mini-speech about artists' rights to protest through their music) when she announced the award was pretty great.

As weird as it may seems, Barbra Streisand is in Eminem's corner. She said this about him, after the release of 8 Mile: "This kid Eminem is really interesting. I can relate to the truth, and I can relate to emotion, and I can relate to him in some strange way. I was raised in the projects. I was born in Brooklyn. We were poor. I relate to that stuff because that's my roots, my heritage." Whatever you may think of Babs, I believe her little sound was a little sound of excitement. Another poor kid made good.

And I thought Michael Moore's behavior was a disgrace.

Actually, I think it was the writers in the auditorium who were booing Moore for using the non-word "fictition." Another blow to the English language.

Seriously, although Moore acted obnoxiously, I thought Adrian Brody hit the right tone, peace-messsage-wise. It was classier, anyway. Then again, he got to kiss Halle Berry in front of millions of people.

Despite what Jane says, Hollywood is actually quite reluctant to make money if it can only be done by touching difficult political issues.

Ahhh...so "touching difficult political issues" is now doublespeak for "making shit up"? I need to update my translator.

And I still maintain that whatever your views on trespassing, even if you think you can win a lawsuit against a security guard, to refuse to move or stop filming when a burly man tells you not to requires a degree of physical courage.

Sure, I'll stipulate to that if you'll stipulate that it takes a special kind of moral midget to film himself being obnoxious and harrassing to wage-slave security guards -- the kind of person whose corner Moore claims to be in, the kind of average Joe he claims to be fighting for -- when he wants to talk to the CEO.

>>being obnoxious and harrassing to wage-slave security guards

Do security guards get paid any better if Michael Moore doesn't show up? Is their job any more interesting? Seems like you're making a load more unsupported assumptions here, Phil.

No, and they don't get paid any better if he does, either.

Look, Moore's whole schtick is predicated on taking on The Man, standing up against Evil Corporations to help the little guy. The security guard is an hourly-wage employee, and probably doesn't even work for the corporation, but for a private security firm -- he is the little guy. But as far as Moore's concerned, he's just cannon fodder for his shtick -- if he can make the guard look like an intimidating goon, or a befuddled moron, all the better. At worst, he's gotten some funny footage, and at best, he's shown how the Evil Corporation has corrupted this hourly-wage employee's noble soul. The guard as an individual doesn't matter to Moore one bit.

I don't think I'm making unsupported assumptions at all. It's not as if I've never seen his movies or read his tripe.

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