Shameful "honors"

From The American Spectator:

The Jean Hersholt Award.

If you're an Oscar watcher, already buying the popcorn for the February 25th ceremonies, you know what this is. In the words of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Hersholt Award "is given to an individual in the motion picture industry whose humanitarian efforts have brought credit to the industry." In other words, this is one of the few awards given out by the Academy that does not honor the recipient for his or her artistic achievements. It chooses among the Hollywood elite who have used their success in motion pictures for various humanitarian causes.

The award includes among its honorees Elizabeth Taylor (her work on AIDS), the late Audrey Hepburn (the United Nations), Gregory Peck (a variety of charities and causes) and even Charlton Heston in his pre-conservative incarnation as spokesman for the National Rifle Association (for support for Civil Rights, among other things.)

But there's a name missing from this list, and the fact that it is missing highlights the reason so many conservatives dismiss not only the Oscar but a number of other prominent awards. The missing name, of course, is Ronald Reagan.

Over the course of a forty-year career in almost sixty films, Reagan served not only as president of the Screen Actors Guild but as a master of ceremonies of the Oscars themselves. Yet the only actor to serve as president of the United States, the man historians now credit with winning the Cold War and freeing millions from bondage, the man who just the other day was rated as second only to Abraham Lincoln in terms of presidential greatness -- for this actor there was not a snow ball's chance in hell of being honored by his peers.

Clearly, the reason had to be Reagan's conservatism. Does anyone seriously think that a former President Robert Redford or former President George Clooney would be unrecognized by the Motion Picture Academy? Of course not. This very year no less than Al Gore -- Al Gore!- is up for a golden statue for his global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

The real inconvenient truth about a number of these high profile awards is that if you are a political conservative you can simply forget about applying. The amusing part of all this is that the same-old-same-old results of ignoring conservatives or blatantly choosing winners based on their liberalism winds up demeaning the award itself, degrading its value to the point that fewer and fewer people even pretend to care.

Who today has the same kind of respect for the Oscars, the Grammys, or even the Nobel Peace Prize, all of which once seemed to have a dazzling glow? Let's be real. The reason Reagan was ignored by the Oscars is the same reason the Dixie Chicks won a Grammy and Jimmy Carter got the Nobel Peace Prize. Carter -- and both Bill and Hillary Clinton -- even got a Grammy for reading an audio version of a book!

It has nothing to do with the stated purpose of the awards in question. The question of who wins these things is settled ahead of time by the recipient's politics. Does anyone really believe that if an ex-Vice President Dick Cheney made a film about the inconvenient untruths of global warming doctrine he'd ever see the inside of the Kodak Theater as an Oscar nominee?

At the end of the movie K-19: The Widowmaker the captain of the submarine is reminiscing with his executive officer and members of the crew about the incident dramatized in the movie. He tells them that he attempted to get the engineer who deliberately exposed himself to a lethal dose of radiation in order to repair the sub's reactor and save the lives of his crew mates declared a "Hero of the Soviet Union" (the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor). The award was turned down by Moscow because it was not a time of war. He contemptuously asks "what value are awards from such men?"

That is the question I would ask about awards like the Oscars and the Grammys and the Nobel Peace Prize. Of what possible value are awards which can be won by men such as Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore?

To a moral person, a thinking person, a decent person to be handed an "award" which put one in the same category as creatures such as that would be a mortal insult not an honor.