The American Film Institute announced something important to the world with its “Moments of Significance” Awards for 2007. The announcement was that the American Film Institute is embarrassingly out of touch with society and is willing to give out meaningless “awards” to document it to one and all. The pretentiously defined “Moments of Significance” may, as their website notes, “include accomplishments of considerable merit; influences with either a positive or negative impression; trends, either new or re-emerging; anniversaries or memorials of special note; and/or movements in new technologies, education, preservation, government or other areas that impact the art of the moving image.” An award of this type is fine if it, you know, actually recognizes events and people that had some sort of cultural impact, unlike most of the seven “winners” on AFI’s list.
It’s amazing in looking at the AFI list that they didn’t even stumble on a significant cultural item by accident. Each item on their list is either irrelevant, highly over-praised, or at least several years behind the times. The first event is the writer’s strike. Ok, that was a big news story in the second half of the year. AFI, however, describes it as “tragic” and a “paradigm shift.” It is tragic for those on strike (and those not on strike who lost their jobs and don’t have residuals to keep them going) and it might shift the way writers (and others) get paid, but who cares? How does this affect my life, or the life of anyone else who watches movies and television? It doesn’t. Read the polls, although people support the writers, mostly no one cares about this strike. If I watch content on my computer and the writer gets $5, $50, $500, or nothing, what’s it to me? The paradigm shift already occurred, AFI, when the web and our handhelds delivered more and more content. Who gets paid for producing it is irrelevant.
Speaking of irrelevant, another “Moment of Significance” was the Discovery Channel’s presentation of Planet Earth in HD. Did anyone watch this show? Well, of course they did, but it wasn’t exactly water cooler talk around the office. It wasn’t a defining moment for either HD or environmentalism, so how is it “significant?” The AFI also put the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni as a significant moment for 2007. Surely these are amazing directors with a staggering work of genius left behind…all of it completed more than 20 years ago. Literally. Neither did anything significant in this decade, or the last. Their deaths leave no void because they weren’t producing anything; whatever influence they had (and it was significant) occurred in the 1960’s for the love of Jehovah. Why put them on the list now? Is it so the AFI voters can look down their noses and say, “we love the great filmmakers, you cretins?”
AFI also showed they are behind the times by listing the iPhone and “hyper-tabloidization” of TV news as two significant events. The iPhone was certainly a cultural phenomenon, but AFI misread it and said “overnight, the iPhone became a symbol of a public that demands its content where they want it and when they want it. The public has had those symbols for the last four or five years. The iPhone is just another cog in a wheel that has been turning for quite awhile. Everyone has seen it, except, apparently, AFI voters. The same is true with the hyper-tabloidization. That didn’t just pop up this year, it didn’t escalate this year, it didn’t do anything this year but continue a trend that started a few years back. What’s next in your breaking trends list, AFI? Negative Presidential campaigning?
Rounding out the list was the many films related to the war on terror creating something AFI calls a “cultural spasm.” I don’t know what a cultural spasm is, but it must be making movies that no one wants to see. Almost all the movies that directly took on the war on terror in general or Iraq in particular were major failures. This is a significant cultural event, making movies nobody wants to see? Even critics left most of the movies cited by AFI (Charlie Wilson’s War, Redacted, In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs) off their top 10 lists. The final item is that cable programming in the summer is blurring the lines of what constitutes a television season. Ok, one out of seven isn’t so bad.
Everyone expects critics, critical organizations, and other big mouths with a forum to have those inevitable top 10 lists at the end of the year. Ours is coming in a few days and I’ll be taking part, they can be a lot of fun. Things like “Moments of Significance” lists are not fun; they are pretentious ways for a small group to try to get their pet hobby horses into the public forum. Stick to putting together lists of the 100 best songs sung by left handed midgets, AFI; you’re not ready for the heavy lifting.
