The Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film isn’t winning many popularity contests itself. The announcement on August 8 of the newest “Oscar” has been received with far less enthusiasm than this year’s megahit movies like “Black Panther” and “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” that will vie for the statuette.

The new award’s intended purpose is to supplement a Best Picture trophy consistently won over the last decade by films appealing mainly to the Academy’s insider circle, despite popular movies being included in an expanded slate of nominees. After all, the big bucks spent by mainstream moviegoers are what not only turn big-budget movies into blockbusters but, via advertisers, pay for the Oscars telecast.

Instead, both industry professionals and the general public have made it overwhelmingly clear that they’re more insulted than intrigued. As populist outreach, it comes off as phony as Nurse Ratched rigging the vote on which TV program her patients can watch in the Oscar-winning “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The misfire exemplifies what cartoonist Jules Feiffer called the “ignorance of authority,” satirized in his Best Animated Short winner “Munro,” in which officials maintain that the four-year-old of the title is a diminutive adult.

In “Karl Hess: Toward Liberty,” which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject in 1981, Hess observed that “if energy can be picked up from any point on the earth, it sort of suggests to you that you don’t need central mechanisms, that you can produce important things at a local level.” This applies just as much to creative energies that inspire filmmaking as to the solar energy that powered Hess’s house. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum noted the irony of Hess’s message being “delivered courtesy of the Academy and AT&T’s Bell System” while the onetime political insider talked of leaving such “big organizations” behind. Yet film production and distribution have already been steadily evolving in Hess’s decentralist direction; even the major studios have moved on from the era shown in “Hail, Caesar!” of filming their Biblical epics, musicals and Westerns all within the same backlot.

While Guillermo del Toro won the most recent Best Director award for the esoteric “The Shape of Water” rather than for one of his crowd-pleasers like “Blade II” or “Pacific Rim,” his arthouse and multiplex fare both illustrate the contention in his acceptance speech that “the greatest thing our art does, and our industry does, is to erase the lines in the sand. We should continue doing that when the world tells us to make them deeper.”

Maybe the real issue is the notion that the Academy Awards, or any one award ceremony, should or even can be the ultimate arbiter of quality in a diverse world. The assumption that other film awards are merely lead-ins to (or the Razzies’ caricature of) the Oscars does a disservice to both. The venerable ceremony would do better competing on an equal footing with newer awards taken just as seriously than as the center of attention by default.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “The Madness of the Academy,” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, 08/23/18
• “Gold standard?,” by Joel Schlosberg, Salt Lake City, Utah Weekly, 08/23/18
• “The Madness of the Academy,” by Joel Schlosberg, New Haven, Connecticut Register, 08/24/18
• “The Madness of the academy,” by Joel Schlosberg, The Register Citizen, [Torrington, Connecticut], 08/24/18
• “The Madness of the academy,” by Joel Schlosberg, The Middletown, Connecticut Press, 08/24/18
• “The Madness of the Academy,” by Joel Schlosberg, The [Phoenix] Arizona Republic, 08/26/18
• “The Madness of the Academy,” by Joel Schlosberg, St. George, Utah Spectrum, 08/26/18
• “The Madness of the Academy,” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 08/29/18
• “The Madness of the Academy,” by Joel Schlosberg, University of New Mexico Daily Lobo, 09/04/18

Caricature by DonkeyHotey, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Between her new “tell-all” book and her use of taped conversations to promote it, Omarosa Manigault Newman (former “Assistant to the President and Director of Communications for the Office of Public Liaison”) has the White House in a tizzy.

President Donald Trump publicly refers to her as a “crazed, crying lowlife” and a “dog.” There’s quite a bit of pearl-clutching over one recording which seems to have been made in the White House Situation Room, where some of the government’s most secret stuff gets discussed.

All of which is par for the course in Trump’s America.

I can understand why some people were surprised when a reality TV personality got elected president.

I can understand why some people were surprised when that reality TV personality president hired another reality TV personality (in fact, someone he had twice reality-TV-“fired”) to work at the White House.

What I can’t understand is why anyone would expect two reality TV personalities to stop acting like reality TV personalities just because their new show broadcasts from a new set at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Is there a serious side at all to these made-for-reality-TV melodramatics? Yes. The Trump campaign organization has invoked the arbitration clause of its non-disclosure agreement versus Omarosa, and rumors (stoked by Trump, presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway, and others) imply another NDA specific to her White House employment but generalized beyond the bounds of protecting classified information.

Exposing the likely existence of that second NDA, along with hopefully successfully defying it, makes Omarosa the current front-runner for the title of “Best, Maybe Even Only, Public Servant Produced by the Trump Administration.”

The sustaining fiction of American government is that citizens and taxpayers are the real employers — the ultimate bosses — and that even the top-most government employees are answerable to us.

Fictions like that can only be stretched so far. The idea that Donald Trump can legally interpose himself between Omarosa’s desire to dish on White House life and our desire to listen to her do so stretches this particular tale to the breaking point. A shift manager at McDonald’s doesn’t get to swear the cooks and cashiers to silence should the corporation’s CEO happen along with questions for them.

If it was up to me, the Oval Office and the entire West Wing of the White House would be covered 24/7 by publicly accessible live-streaming web cameras. THEY claim to work for US, remember? The employees don’t get to hide from the employers. What they do on the clock, and how they do it, is our business, not their privileged secret.

Of course, it’s not up to me, and the fiction will likely survive even without turning the White House into an uncut (and probably even more boring) version of Big Brother or Keeping Up With the Kardashians. But Omarosa’s book and its promotion campaign are turning into a much-needed test case for just how far from transparency the executive branch can go without the public, and possibly the courts, finally putting our feet down.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In mid-August, the New Haven, Connecticut Register reports, more than 70 people suddenly fell ill at a local park, collapsing and losing consciousness. Terror attack? Accidental industrial release of a deadly chemical? No. The culprit was “K2,” aka “synthetic marijuana,” laced with fentanyl. The victims were revived by first responders and at the local hospital. Thankfully no one died and an alleged drug dealer was quickly arrested.

But, as law enforcement likes to tell us, getting a single dealer off the street does little good. We need to move up the food chain and nab the people at the origins of this thing.

Who are those top dogs? Whose names can be presented to a grand jury for indictments in the conspiracy to put “synthetic marijuana” on our streets? Here are two: Uttam Dhillon and Scott Gottlieb.

Dhillon is the Acting Administrator of the US Drug Enforcement Agency. Gottlieb heads the US Food and Drug Administration.

Together, Dhillon and Gottlieb oversee the “scheduling” of drugs under federal law. And, like their predecessors, they have conspired to create a market for “synthetic marijuana” by putting REAL marijuana on Schedule I, fraudulently claiming that it has a “high potential for abuse,” “no currently acceptable medical use,” and a “lack of accepted safety.”

In point of fact, marijuana is about as “abused” as caffeine, is demonstrably an effective treatment for various medical conditions (Queen Victoria drank it as a tea for menstrual cramps), and isn’t even in the same league as alcohol or tobacco when it comes to safety — year after year, the number of marijuana overdose deaths in the US totals a big whopping zero. It’s a common, benign plant, with numerous useful attributes, that grows in all fifty states.

So, why do Dhillon and Gottlieb conspire to keep marijuana on Schedule I? When you have to ask why, the answer is usually “money.”

Dhillon’s DEA employs more than 10,000 people at an annual cost of nearly $3 billion.  Gottlieb’s FDA employs nearly 15,000 people at an annual cost of more than $5 billion.

De-scheduling marijuana would mean fewer jobs and lower budgets at those agencies. That is the sole plausible reason to keep marijuana on Schedule I. The other reasons are, simply, lies. And that makes conspiring to do so a matter of theft by deception, aka fraud.

The New Haven overdoses and incidents like them are an aggravating factor. The DEA/FDA conspiracy to keep marijuana off the legal market, and to make it less available illegally through violent law enforcement action, creates the market for unsafe substances like “synthetic marijuana.”

If not for Dhillon and Gottlieb, the 70-plus New Haven victims would have been able to purchase the real thing — an eminently safe substance no more dangerous, and possibly less dangerous, than an everyday energy drink — at their local stores of choice. They’d have had pleasant, euphoric, brief highs before going about their business instead of collapsing and requiring medical attention.

It’s time to put these racketeers out of business. Indict, convict, and de-schedule.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY