The Oregon Faith Report - Faith News from Oregon

March 5, 2010

By Beaver Believer,
Portland writer

The Academy Awards are just hours away and it is too bad that many of the movies up for Best Picture provide such poor role models in the view of both religion and sexuality.

On religion, the film “A Serious Man” delves into Jewish philosophy by offering up diatribes of painful nothingness and then decides to make the climax of the movie about a teen who tries to get through his bar mitzvah while stoned.  Avatar jumps into the environmental spirituality arena. It approaches the historic debate over the balance between man and nature by overloading the scales.   Man (as represented by business, the military and America) is portrayed as recklessly and pervasively evil while nature is seen as a holy shrine where even the smallest of animals and plants are sacred.   Avatar seemed way too preachy and unbalanced for my taste.

On sexuality, human sexual relationships are tossed around like trash.   In, Up in the Air, a wife flies around the country having an affair, the main character is portrayed as a frequent flyer philanderer, and a husband character bows out of his wedding at the last minute because he is basically unexcited.   In An Education we have an older man pressing sex with a teenage girl.   In a Serious Man, the wife leaves her husband like she was changing her hair color and the husband has sex with the neighbor on a whim.  In Avatar, the leading lady falls for a guy who forgets to tell her up to the very last day that his people are going to destroy their world.   Her people are almost entirely wiped out and she takes him back.  District 9 features an alien prostitutes, and the list goes on.

There are quality movies up for Best Picture, but the often repetition of the same bad religion and sexual themes is a rut Hollywood needs to get out of.