Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 2006

The Contenders:

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu: Babel
Martin Scorsese: The Departed (winner)
Clint Eastwood: Letters from Iwo Jima
Stephen Frears: The Queen
Paul Greengrass: United 93

Two Sides

Film: Paradise Now; United 93
Format: DVD from personal collection (Paradise Now) and from NetFlix (United 93) on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Fear is a power with which it is difficult to contend. How we approach fear and deal with fear in many ways defines who and what we are. Fear can cause us to lock up, it can kill us, or it can bring out our greatest and most positive qualities. Paradise Now and United 93 are both films about terrorism, one from each side, but they are just as much about fear—fear of death, fear of life, fear of action, fear of inaction.

Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now concerns the lives and potential deaths of a pair of Palestinian men, Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman). They live on the West Bank, and as Palestinians, are essentially prisoners in their own land under Israeli occupation, at least in from the point of the film. I’m not going to go into the geopolitical implications of the Palestinian occupation. That’s far beyond the scope of a movie blog. I’ve only get the films as my text, and I bluntly refuse to side with either Israel or Palestine for the sake of a film. In the context of this film, Israel is the oppressor.