War Films Recruit The Oscar Voter Troops

Strangely, the two war films nominated for best picture this year have friendly forces who have been recruiting the Oscar voter troops. In February, the producer of THE HURT LOCKER, Nicholas Chartier, emailed a number of Oscar voters urging them not to vote for AVATAR(although not quite in those open terms). Over the weekend, the film's producer issued an apology for his very overt attempt to sway Oscar voters.

And as bad as this was, an even stranger attempt by some rabbis to influence the Oscar voting in favor of the Quentin Tarantino film, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, has recently developed. Strangely, a few rabbis feel that the storyline of this odd revenge film is loosely like a retelling of the revenge story of Esther from the Old Testament, in which Hamans's ten sons even swung from the gallows and 75,000 Persians were supposedly killed as the ancient Jews avoided extermination at the hands of the Persians. As the Jewish celebration of Purim takes place on Sunday through Monday, some in the Jewish community are making a sort of push to propel the film by Quentin Tarantino towards the Oscar win.

A number of synagogues even arranged for screenings of the Quentin Tarantino film including a question and answer session at one synagogue with the famous, but controversial, filmmaker. For many Jews, the film which portrays the violent death of Hitler and before he can exact the Holocaust is a great celebration. But for his part, Tarantino claims to not have known about the revenge elements being similar to the Old Testament account of the fall of the Persian Empire before they could liquidate the Jews of the region.

INGLORIOUS BASTERDS does have many memorable moments such as the scene where the female hero, Shoshanna(whose character parallels Esther of the Old Testament) puts on makeup that looks very much like Native American war paint for her final mission to kill the dreaded Nazi officer who murdered her family.

Whether all of this extra effort by some interests to propel their pet films to the top of the Oscar film heap really works yet remains to be seen. The Oscar voting ends tomorrow and the awards ceremony is in a few days.