THE day the left died in Hollywood, surely, was the day that a few too many Queer Eyes had their way with Michael Moore as he set off on his Oscar campaign. The baseball cap and 1970's leisure ensemble gave way to quasi-Libeskind eyeglasses and spiky hair that screamed "I am worthy of a cameo on 'Entourage.' " But not worthy of an Oscar. "Fahrenheit 9/11" got zero nominations, leaving the Best Picture race to five apolitical movies. Since none of those five has yet sold $100 million worth of tickets, let alone the $350-million-plus of a "Lord of the Rings"-level megahit, the only real drama accruing to this year's Oscar telecast was whether its ratings would plunge as low as the Golden Globes.
But two weeks out from the big night, the prospects for a little conflict are looking up. Just when it seemed that Hollywood had turned a post-election page in the culture wars, the commissars of the right cooked up a new, if highly unlikely, grievance against "Holly-weird," as they so wittily call it. This was no easy task. They couldn't credibly complain that "The Passion of the Christ" was snubbed by the movie industry's "elite" (translation: Jews), since it nailed three nominations, including one for makeup (translation: really big noses). That showing bested not only "Fahrenheit 9/11" but "Shrek 2," the year's top moneymaker. Nor could they resume hostilities against their perennial bogeymen Ben Affleck, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, Barbra Streisand and Whoopi Goldberg. All are nonplayers in this year's awards.
So what do you do? Imagine SpongeBob tendencies in the carefully sanitized J. M. Barrie of "Finding Neverland"? Attack a recently deceased American legend, Ray Charles, for demanding that his mistress get an abortion in "Ray"? No, only a counterintuitive route could work. Hence, the campaign against Clint Eastwood, a former Republican officeholder (Mayor of Carmel, Calif., in the late 1980's), Nixon appointee to the National Council of the Arts and action hero whose breakthrough role in the Vietnam era was as a vigilante cop, Dirty Harry, whom Pauline Kael famously called "fascist." There hasn't been a Hollywood subversive this preposterous since the then 10-year-old Shirley Temple's name surfaced at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in 1938.
No matter. Rush Limbaugh used his radio megaphone to inveigh against the "liberal propaganda" of "Million Dollar Baby," in which Mr. Eastwood plays a crusty old fight trainer who takes on a fledgling "girl" boxer (Hilary Swank) desperate to be a champ. Mr. Limbaugh charged that the film was a subversively encoded endorsement of euthanasia, and the usual gang of ayotallahs chimed in. Michael Medved, the conservative radio host, has said that "hate is not too strong a word" to characterize his opinion of "Million Dollar Baby." Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a longtime ally of the Christian right, went on MSNBC to accuse Mr. Eastwood of a cultural crime comparable to Bill Clinton having "brought the term 'oral sex' to America's dinner tables."
"What do you have to give these people to make them happy?" Mr. Eastwood asked when I phoned to get his reaction to his new status as a radical leftist. He is baffled that those "who expound from the right on American values" could reject a movie about a heroine who is "willing to pull herself up by the bootstraps, to work hard and persevere no matter what" to realize her dream. "That all sounds like Americana to me, like something out of Wendell Willkie," he says. "And the villains in the movie include people who are participating in welfare fraud."
What galls the film's adversaries - or so they say - is a turn in the plot that they started giving away on the radio and elsewhere in December, long before it started being mentioned in articles like the one you're reading now. They hoped to "spoil" the movie and punish it at the box office, though there's no evidence that they have succeeded. As Mr. Eastwood has pointed out, advance knowledge of the story's ending did nothing to deter the audience for "The Passion of the Christ." My own experience is that knowing the ultimate direction of "Million Dollar Baby" - an organic development that in no way resembles a plot trick like that in "The Sixth Sense" - only deepened my second viewing of it.
There's no dream team, either in the boxing arena or in the emergency room, in "Million Dollar Baby." While there is much to admire in the year's other Oscar-nominated movies - the full-bodied writing in "Sideways," the cinematic bravura of "The Aviator," the awesome Jamie Foxx in "Ray" - Mr. Eastwood's film, while also boasting great acting, is the only one that challenges America's current triumphalist daydream. It does so not because it has any politics or takes a stand on assisted suicide but because it has the temerity to suggest that fights can have consequences, that some crises do not have black-and-white solutions and that even the pure of heart are not guaranteed a Hollywood ending. What makes some feel betrayed and angry after seeing "Million Dollar Baby" is exactly what makes many more stop and think: one of Hollywood's most durable cowboys is saying that it's not always morning in America, and that it may take more than faith to get us through the night.
It's a standard tactic for these holier-than-thou bullies to cite movies they don't like as proof that, in Mr. Medved's formulation, "the entertainment industry" is "not in touch with the general public." The industry's profits prove exactly the reverse, but never mind. Even in this case, were Mr. Eastwood's film actually an endorsement of assisted suicide, the public would still be on his side, not his critics'. The latest Gallup poll on the subject, taken last year, shows that 53 percent of Americans find assisted suicide "morally acceptable" as opposed to the 41 percent who find it "morally wrong." (The figures for Catholics are identical).
C'mon Clint, fire back at these sanctimonious, gutless nazi frauds. Make everybody's day.
I never thought about the political side of this when making the film," Mr. Eastwood says. He is both bemused and concerned that a movie with no political agenda should be construed by some as a polemic and arouse such partisan rage. "Maybe I'm getting to the age when I'm starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people are so angry now," he adds. "You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends. Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently from you is a moron and an idiot - both on the right and the left."
THE day the left died in Hollywood, surely, was the day that a few too many Queer Eyes had their way with Michael Moore as he set off on his Oscar campaign. The baseball cap and 1970's leisure ensemble gave way to quasi-Libeskind eyeglasses and spiky hair that screamed "I am worthy of a cameo on 'Entourage.' " But not worthy of an Oscar. "Fahrenheit 9/11" got zero nominations, leaving the Best Picture race to five apolitical movies. Since none of those five has yet sold $100 million worth of tickets, let alone the $350-million-plus of a "Lord of the Rings"-level megahit, the only real drama accruing to this year's Oscar telecast was whether its ratings would plunge as low as the Golden Globes.
