The King's Speech You Didn't Hear

The one where he thanked Neville Chamberlain for appeasing Hitler.

In a great piece re-posted on the National Post blog, Christopher Hitchens, having already tried to ruin religion, attempts to spoil the Oscars as well by pointing out the historical accuracies in the King’s Speech. While the film depicts King George VI overcoming his endearing stutter to rally his subjects for war against the Nazis, in reality George VI helped push Neville Chamberlain’s now notorious appeasement policy through Parliament after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, and was a staunch supporter of appeasement even after most British leaders were girding for war. This is more than inaccurate filmmaking, according to Hitchens, because today’s royal family (which is of German descent, remember) continues to invoke the “post-fabricated myth of its participation in ‘Britain’s finest hour.’ In fact, had it been up to them, the finest hour would never have taken place. So this is not a detail but a major desecration of the historical record—now apparently gliding unopposed toward a baptism by Oscar.” A good article, and The Mark Newsroom looks forward to Hitchens’s upcoming columns debunking the myths that toys can talk, and that Leonardo Di Caprio can steal your dreams.

Jaime Weinman has an interesting piece on the Maclean’s blog contemplating the obsoleteness of the Oscar’s best director category. His argument is that the quality of a film is inseparable from the quality of the directing, so the best director and best picture categories are really the same thing. But the decision of the Academy to revert to nominating ten movies but only five directors “has made the best director nominees a little more fun to look at, because it allows us to get a hint — just a slight hint — of which movies really have the support of the Academy as a whole and which ones were probably nominated for commercial reasons.” So just as Steven Spielberg was passed over but his hugely successful Jaws was nominated, this year Christopher Nolan was snubbed but Inception gets a nod, presumably for putting asses in the seats.

Tune in tomorrow for when the Mark Newsroom goes back to writing about, you know, news.