Now that all the weeklies have run their pre- and post issues on who will win and who won Oscars, it’s left to those of us staffing the theatres and rental joints around the country to assess and satisfy the insatiable demands for these yet-to-be-released videos or currently running films. Last year, most of the big titles were already released, and the rest of America had a chance to evaluate the nominees. And despite rooting for underdogs like Lost in Translation it made sense that Peter Jackson should be rewarded for three epics that were enchantingly redemptive holiday fare. But it’s films like 21 Grams and Mystic River that aggravate me most.

Maybe you hadn’t noticed, but advertising campaigns for Oscar-nominated films are extraordinarily intrusive and condescending (a fact illuminated by Chris Rock’s off the cuff interviews in the Magic Johnson Multiplex in L.A.), and more than anything else, confusing. How many calls have been answered about when Million Dollar Baby will be released…and it’s still playing down the street! Keep in mind that Philadelphia once boasted more than thirty-five theatres, a number that has dwindled to fewer than fifteen or so, many of them multiplexes, a withering that has meant that genuine independents and art house flicks get banished to select New York theatres with no wider release (f. ex. Notre Musique played in Philadelphia for a week here, closing last Thursday), and the films that do reach us are either in the Philadelphia Film Festival or are big studio films compressed into these theatres, while the grotesque budgets grace the screens elsewhere.

So the depression begins: the big releases of the past week were Flight of the Phoenix and The Exorcist prequel, not heartening for those of us who know all too well that the new demand for The Motorcycle Diaries and Maria Full of Grace is based entirely on their Oscar exposure, and that more than a few of our customers will return these films unhappily, clearly not comprehending that lesbian supersecret agents will not detonate nuclear submarines in drydock, and or that Jude Law doesn’t have a cameo. Worse still, these films are made for our most geriatic clientele - since when do actors like Imelda Staunton and Annette Bening resonate with people approaching even forty?

As I’ve posted here repeatedly, Hollywood is in crisis. There’s little demand for the films heralded as the year’s best, and a movement once begun by Martin Scorsese is something he can’t refute, and still his complicity bears no fruit. That another boxing picture should win an Academy award is appalling, and that simple, homely Hilary Swank might yet again win Oscar appalls me. Like a cut rate Julia Roberts, Swank can only play victims, and who doesn’t love a good victim? And to look at the nominees for Best Director is to stare into the robes of the Grim Reaper - or to accept the routine middle class taste exemplified in a film like Sideways - embracing the fear and loathing of our great American splendor.

Sure, there are quiet victories for the youth movement. Maybe Jamie Foxx has a performance in him such as that in Collateral or Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchett, and others will consider small scripts, roles, and paychecks to maintain their credibility as actors capable of something other than grandiose impersonations. The profound sadnesses in films I liked this year, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I ♥ Huckabees, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou exemplify an artistic resistance that has mainstream traction. Although we’ll never reach a socialist utopia through film, as much as Cassavetes and Coppola imagined it, the profit motive has deleterious effects on large scale flops, as do star productions in films that have no more than one weekend atop the box office (as of this writing, The Pacifier, starring Vin Diesel, was this weekend’s winner).

The reductionist view suggests that the modern day Cleopatra’s and the cynical focus on budgets and special effects requires a return to small films with stories and characters, simply to maximize profits at the box office, but nevertheless has immense returns in rental as well. While it may not be true of the mainstream video rental houses, it’s certainly the case in offbeat stores, and Lost in Translation proved last year’s best rental at our location, with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind placing a respectable fourth. But it’s programs like Project Greenlight that function as a reification of the damning process of ceaseless artistic compromise that constitutes the stuff of modern day filmmaking; rather it’s a demonstration of the commercial impulse that crushes the artistic spirit intrinsic to filmmaking. In very few instances does one find genuinely maverick direction, and fewer still actors willing to stretch themselves as controversially conventional characters instead of blockbuster superheroes or celluloid doppelgangers.

So it falls to the clerk to gnash his or her teeth and wrench Ray from the stocking shelf for the thousandth time, not because it’s such a grand retelling of a troubled but blessed life, but because it’s the trickle down favor of the cognoscenti flooding America’s cultural consciousness, drowning all independent thought and aesthetic judgements, and washing away any notion than an individual had ever made a personal film without the permission of a studio, or had ever defied a producer, a glorified actuarial scientist who occasionally accepts an Oscar on behalf of his more or less talented minions. It’s a depressing task to be the handmaiden to such blind cultural consumption, giving lie to the notion that the clerk serves solely to insult the customer, when it’s the customer begging to be rebuked for his or her atrophied taste.