With each passing day and each passing win for a live actor, the chances of Andy Serkis finally being recognized go even farther away than the chances of the movie itself taking home a well deserved to award. I recognized “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” as my most essential movie of the year. Quentin Tarantino placed “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” as his second best film of 2011. The love is there. But not when it comes to awards. Once again, movie awards are handed out on the basis of staid, conservative and breathtakingly mundane perspectives from the point of view of today. Twenty years from now “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” will be universally recognized as the most important film of the year. I see it and Quentin Tarantino almost sees it. Twenty years from now, when motion capture performance is finally recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences the year before, what Andy Serkis contributed to that film will finally be recognized.
In the meantime, some Frenchy doing absolutely nothing new or extraordinary or particularly memorable is plucked out of European stardom and Hollywood obscurity for global superstardom by a bunch of foreign journalists with a history of trading votes for money.
It’s a madhouse…a madhouse!
“Rise of the Planet of the Apes” taps into the social zeitgeist of the slave race rising up to overcome their shackles of bondage placed over them by the equivalent of a guy who looks a lot like Draco Malfoy. The guy who looks a lot like Draco Malfoy and that guy who thinks he’s Don Cheadle but ain’t are the ideological equivalent of Hosni Mubarak and Mitt Romney. Caesar the chimp represents the best of us from those unnamed Arabs who challenged contemporary pharaohs to Ellen Barkin who was merely exercising her rights to support the Occupy Wall Street movement when a prototypical fascist in blue representative of American law enforcement knocked her to the ground. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” speaks to a generational shift in awareness of the inherent unfairness of dictatorships in Tunisia and plutocratic grinding up democratic precepts in America.
Mitt Romney pays a 15% tax rate. Andy Serkis deserves an Oscar merely for creating a believable character that isn’t rich, white, fat or Republican to show us that even in America it is possible to overthrow the government through cooperation of those who have not when they turn their focus away from video games and sexting to taking on those who have. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” gives hope to all those who think that the only places where revolution can occur are in places where the tyranny is blatantly obvious instead of camouflaged beautifully behind flags, ties and lies. By not taking advantage of the chance to award an actually progressive movie with a liberal agenda, Hollywood runs the risk of losing that phony title of hotbed of socialist and communist ideology.
First they hand their top award to a movie that actually asks audiences to feel sorry for a British king whose biggest concern is that he stutters and then they take a whiz all over their chance to award a movie that stands for everything they are daily accused of standing for by clueless Tea Party members and their King to be: the 15 percenter with the name better reserved for a baseball glove. At last: the reality of Hollywood as the bastion of conservatism that it actually is may finally become obvious even to those who think a billionaire paying less in taxes than they do should be the leader of the plutocracy that runs America for their corporate overlords.
For more from Timothy Sexton, Caesar’s proud primate cousin, check out:
“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”: the Most Essential Movie of 2011
RipoffReport.com: Empowering the Consumer Once Again in the US Plutocracy
The Scariest Words Spoken by Mitt Romney…So Far