Fictitious Times

by Philip Parodayco // written on 24 March 2003, saved in Pjournal

As we all know, a disfunctional Academy Awards show went on tonight. The news had spread that the Academy didn't want the ceremony to involve anti-war speeches and everyone seemed awkward and uncomfortable trying to deal with a celebration of entertainment during a time of war. Everyone, that is, except Michael Moore who received the best feature-length documentary award for Bowling For Columbine .

When his name was called, every one of the best documentary film nominees joined him onstage where he delivered this statement to Hollywood and the world:

Whoa. On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan from Canada, I'd like to thank the Academy for this. I have invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and we would like to… They're here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it's the fictition of duct tape or fictition of orange alerts we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up. Thank you very much.

That statement made the whole event worth watching. The fact that EVERY OTHER documentary nominee joined Moore on stage for this — a demonstration that was loudly booed by the Hollywood audience — and then followed him out of the theatre made a fantastic impression.

While searching around the web looking for a transcript of this statement, I found something even more extraordinary: commentary from last Thursday's Washington Times, a hard-core conservative newspaper, deriding President Bush's war as a “reckless path” and comparing his actions to Hitler's in Poland. Let this sink in — a right-wing paper, a White House favorite no less, published an editorial comparing Bush to Hitler. I'll file this away in the “I never thought I'd see the day” category. Astounding.