Oscars: awards inside Plato's cave

Tonight is another night I'm glad not to have a TV: Oscar night. It might mean something if the film industry had something worthwhile to show for its annual prolific overheated productions; but when Terry Teachout resigned as Crisis magazine's film review editor because he said there was no longer anything worth his time reviewing, I felt confirmed in my prejudices that there's relatively little of value in recent vintage films. Bella Martha (Mostly Martha in the English release) in German with English subtitles is probably the only film this year that really caught my attention so far. Charming. I recommend it. If you like gourmet cuisine, good humor and romance without prurient sex, I recommend it.

Whenever the Oscars roll around, however, my mind reverts to Book VII of Plato's Republic and Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave, where those imprisoned inside the cave of ignorance are playing games down in the dark among the dim shadows, awarding prizes to one another when a shadow-world champion emerges and reacting resentfully when the freed prisoner who has ascended out of the cave of ignorance and actually seen the real outside world returns to try share what the real world is like. In Plato's account, they want to kill him -- a direct allusion to the execution of his master, Socrates, at the hands of a democratic court of law in Athens in 339 BC. There are always tensions of one kind or another -- political, sociological, psychological, epistemological, religious -- between society and Socrates -- or, in this case, between the values of Hollywood and the values of perennial philosophy, which, after all, is in vary many ways quite Catholic.

There was a time when Hollywood had directors and films sympathetic to Catholic values. Those years were short-lived, and we can't expect anything quite like them to return within our lifetimes, whatever genuinely good films may surface here and there may in our long past post-Christian culture. This is not to say that Catholics and other Christians should not work to reform and renew the film industry wherever they have some influence. My wife herself has her hand in a script writing niche and thus a vested interested to that degree.

Yet we are both past caring who wins Oscars this year. What I would like to do is come up with some sort of award to offer in the name of the Society for the Defenestration of Television Sets, if you remember my post by that name from last November. But that's a subject for another post.