Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1968

The Contenders:

Cliff Robertson: Charly (winner)
Alan Bates: The Fixer
Alan Arkin: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Peter O’Toole: The Lion in Winter
Ron Moody: Oliver!

Blood Libel

Film: The Fixer
Format: Internet video on laptop.

I have sat here looking at the base template for my reviews for a good 10 minutes before I typed in anything beyond the why/why not, the tags, and the titles. I honestly don’t know what to say about The Fixer other that it seems like John Frankenheimer found a book based on a real-life case that seems to have been ripped straight out of the mind of Franz Kafka. Going through Oscar movies means spending a great deal of time dealing with the Holocaust, something I’ve complained about before. In this case, we’re not talking about that, but we are absolutely balls-deep in discussing the persecution of the Jews. It seems endlessly fascinating and horrifying to me that we live in a world were a century ago crimes like blood libel and host desecration were taken seriously.

I should probably explain what those two things are, since they are so spectacularly bizarre that I have trouble wrapping my mind around them. Host desecration is easy to figure out once you realize that the host in this case is blessed communion wafers and not someone holding a party. Since in Catholic belief the pasty wafers become the literal body of Christ once they have been blessed, someone doing anything to a blessed wafer is essentially committing a crime against the bodily person of Christ himself. Blood libel is even more staggering. There was a common thought that when the Jews celebrated Passover, they baked their matzos with the blood of Christian children. Because of this, plenty of Jews were accused, tried, sentenced, and punished for the murder of children.