Hollywood's Wars

The Academy Awards are a cultural artifact. Like the rings on a tree, or the sediment layers of a fossil bed, they provide a record -- of what we were thinking about, what made us laugh, what frightened us, year by year. They also provide a chance to see glamorous actors and actresses in really cool clothes, but we'll leave that for Joan and Melissa Rivers.

I've been looking at this year's nominees for best picture and comparing them to best-picture nominees over the past 70 years. Because America is at war, I have been especially curious about how this year's nominees compare with those of other war periods -- World War II, Korea, Vietnam. My conclusion is that it's not the war abroad that matters this year but the one at home.

What's obvious about this year's nominees is that they are not the usual Tinseltown entertainment. America may have its troubles, but Hollywood's response is introspection rather than escapism. Each of the five nominated pictures -- "Brokeback Mountain," "Capote," "Crash," "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Munich" -- is a journey inward. Nobody would accuse the producers of trying to take our minds off our problems.

This year's best movies are dark and deeply serious, embracing racial and sexual themes that Hollywood has often buried. The year's headline film has to be "Brokeback Mountain." Its portrait of suppressed gay love was a genuine breakthrough, opening a category of experience that had previously been out of bounds for a mass-market film. I felt the same way about "Crash," which had such jolting sounds and images of what race feels like in America today that it seemed to be wired directly into your nerve endings. I enjoyed "Capote," too, though like Truman Capote's work, it seemed more a one-man show than a fully realized movie.

In this war year, the Oscar nominees include two antiwar films, "Munich" and "Good Night, and Good Luck." Each chose an oblique way to express the anger and confusion that Americans feel about Iraq and the war on terrorism. And each highlighted the personal courage involved in challenging government policy in wartime. The profile of a mythic Edward R. Murrow defying McCarthyism during the Cold War implicitly criticized the media's coverage of the Bush administration. And Steven Spielberg's brave portrait of disoriented Israeli hit men showed us how anti-terrorist wars of revenge can peel back against themselves.

Compare this year's list with the best-picture winners during other wars. Start with World War II: For 1942 the winner was "Mrs. Miniver," a tear-jerker about a middle-class British family during the Blitz that even its director, William Wyler, said was "obviously a propaganda film." The winner for 1943 was the most romantic piece of wartime propaganda ever made, "Casablanca." For 1944 it was the heartwarming but eminently forgettable "Going My Way," with Bing Crosby as a crooning priest. It was as the war was ending that Hollywood allowed itself to brood a bit. The 1945 winner, "The Lost Weekend," was an unflinching look at the ravages of alcoholism; the 1946 winner, "The Best Years of Our Lives," conveyed the trauma of returning war veterans.

Korean War films were flamboyantly escapist. The winner for 1951 was the elegant but frivolous "An American in Paris." The next year's "best picture" was a Hollywood flapdoodle about circus life, Cecil B. DeMille's "The Greatest Show on Earth."

The Vietnam War was a slow-burning fuse. While the war was escalating, the Oscar winners were lovable fluff or Hollywood morality tales: "The Sound of Music" (1965); "A Man for All Seasons" (1966); "In the Heat of the Night" (1967) and "Oliver!" (1968). It was only later that Hollywood engaged the darkness and confusion of the war, in "The Deer Hunter," which won the Oscar for 1978, and "Platoon," which won in 1986.

Perhaps this year's crop of Oscar nominees is telling us that America doesn't really feel it's at war. The war in Iraq touches the soldiers who are there and their families, but for most other people it is largely an abstraction. Who needs escapist entertainment to distract you from a war you don't see or feel in the first place? In "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Munich," we are celebrating the people who lose faith in government assurances, not the fighters.

The great Iraq war movies will come in time, as the reality of that conflict and its consequences become clearer. It's the culture wars that motivate this year's best-picture nominees -- the wars at home over race and gender that we experience every day.

davidignatius@washpost.com