Human rights became the centerpiece of the Academy Awards last night, as Slumdog Millionaire and Milk stole the stage, collecting the majority of the golden men.
Where Milk speaks to the struggles of the gay and lesbian community for basic civil liberties, Slumdog shook the American psyche into reality with their high levels of liberty, justice and privilege by depicting the brutal poverty of Mumbai plagued by classism and sexism.
By honoring cinematic achievements deeply invested in widening the scope of the American socio-cultural psyche, the 2009 Academy Awards emphasized the importance of film as an artistic, subversive, and above all, highly politically medium.
Never has their been a more important time. Slumdog well puts America’s alarming unemployment rates, recession and failing economy into perspective. Similarly, the extreme bigotry and intolerance brought out by the passage of Proposition 8 in California, makes a film like Milk and the words of Dustin Lance Black and Sean Penn more important than ever.
