OSCAR PPS: NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST

People have asked me why I didn’t mention the Oscar win for AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. I will now.

I was happy it won, because I thought it was a great documentary, and because the director of it was Davis Guggenheim, who directed the episode of DEADWOOD I was on, and as I said in my post on that experience, is one of the most decent people I ever worked with, or for, in movies or TV.

I didn’t see the other documentaries, so I don’t know if AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH was the “best” but it did its job really well. It took a lot of dry material, already known by most of us, but put it together in a way that made it entertaining and engaging, with the help of Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore.

I was a little embarrassed by the self-congratulatory feeling to some of the praise of Gore at the Oscars. It isn’t like Gore is the first environmentalist, or the most active, though he certainly was one of the few politicians to have the foresight to address it, despite the ways that was used against him by his political opponents.

I never met Gore, but judging from the public record, his own actions and speeches, he too seems like a very decent guy, as well as smart. I don’t doubt that if he was president the problems our country faces right now would be different, and a whole lot less foreboding. Nor do I doubt that our prestige in the world would be as damaged as it has been by Junior and his cohorts.

Would Gore have avoided 9/11. Possibly. He, and his advisors, were well aware of the terrorist threat from Bin Laden and Al Quida (or however you spell it). They were ready to address it instead of ignore it, as happened when Bush was handed the election by the Supreme Court.

And Gore certainly would have addressed environmental issues better, not being such a lackey for the oil business, nor would he have abandoned diplomacy for a policy of “preemptive war” nor condoned torture.

It was sweet to see him and Guggenheim accept the Oscar for their effort to educate a wider audience on the effects of global warming and leave them with a message of hope that there are still things that can be done to at least begin to slow the environmental damage down if not eventually reverse it.

Sometimes nice guys do finish first. Even in elections.