The Golden Phallus

All those who care, like The Wife, will be watching the Oscars tonight.

AlGore will be there and will probably win the Oscar for “Best Comedic Docudrama”.

The trouble is, “The Nominating Committee” bent the rules for his film. And not everyone within the community is looking the other way.

Al Gore’s movie on climate change is likely to win an Oscar for best documentary on Sunday even though it arguably violates the Academy’s own criteria and should be disqualified, critics say.

But, they argue, the way in which the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has handled the issue in the past shows a clear political bias.

Documentaries that distort reality and shade the truth are insulated from criticism so long as they advance left-wing causes like global warming and gun control, said independent filmmaker Dan Gifford, a former Oscar nominee and Emmy Award winner.

According to the “rule 12” standard for documentary films established by the Academy, while it is permissible to employ storytelling devices such as re-enactments, stock footage, stills and animations, the emphasis must be on fact and not fiction.

The critics argue that in the case of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the criteria are not met.

One point of contention in Gore’s movie is animated footage of a polar bear struggling to find stable sea ice. Gore has argued that human-induced global warming is directly impacting polar bears’ habitat and sea ice in particular. Consequently, he suggests, polar bears are forced to swim longer distances and sometimes drown in the process.

“A new scientific study shows that for the first time they’re finding polar bears that have actually drowned swimming long distances – up to sixty miles – to find the ice,” Gore says in the movie.

John Berlau, author of a new book on the environmental movement entitled “Eco-Freaks,” claims the polar bear scene alone should disqualify Gore’s film from consideration for best documentary, because it departs from reality.

Berlau noted that while the movie’s companion book says the bears were drowning in “significant numbers,” the study Gore is most likely referring to only found four polar bear carcasses in the sea off Alaska.

That episode took place after a severe storm, he noted, but Gore makes no reference to a storm during the film’s animated polar bear sequence.

Gore also never cites a source for his polar bear claim, Berlau points out, but scientists on both sides of the polar bear debate told Cybercast News Service he was probably referring to a recent report filed by the U.S. Minerals Management Service.

Researchers with the service in 2004 found four dead polar bears floating in the sea off Alaska but said in a report that the bears “are believed to have drowned as a result of the storm.”

Berlau, an analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) – an organization known for global warming skepticism – who has also written about the entertainment industry, said the polar bear sequence does not square with a large body of scientific evidence.

“The polar bear cartoon was the emotional linchpin of this movie for a lot of people, but the science behind it was not rooted in truth and is a violation of rule 12 on many levels,” Berlau told Cybercast News Service.

“If the context of this film were not something politically correct like global warming, it would not be considered for an award,” he said.

Now, the folks pointing all this out will probably be accused of having “sour apples” or some such tripe, but they have one big, undeniable point of fact. That fact DQ’s AlGore’s film. Period. End of story (for folks living in reality).

If you scope through a selection of the bigger left-wing blogs (and a goodly number of the small ones too) you’ll likely see a number of leftards hoping that Gore will use his Oscar acceptance speech as the announcement of his candidacy for the 2008 Democrat Presidential Nominee.

I’ve always been against forcing mind altering drugs like Ritalin on children. But I have no qualms against offering them free-of-charge to adults who act like children.