The Academy Awards are over, and amidst all the social commentary and the good Chris Rock jokes and the director who actually managed to talk the music down when they tried to chase him off (because his comments had drifted towards humanitarian remarks), some awards were given out.
A couple of those awards, including Best Picture, went to Spotlight, a film dramatizing the Boston Globe's investigation of Catholic priests in Boston suspected of sexually assaulting boys, which began to blow the top off a more widespread theme of corruption and sodomy throughout the Church. Candidly, like most of the films nominated for awards this year (or to be honest, most films period), I didn't see it, but I will assume by the near-universal acclaim it garnered that it was, in fact, a very good movie.
But there was another group who rode a wave of pride spurred by Spotlight's win. It's something I should have seen coming, and yet I only realized what was about to happen when I read this first retweet from a local sports journalist I follow.
Recommendations: if you enjoyed Spotlight, you might also enjoy subscribing to a God damn newspaper.#Oscars— Tabatha Southey (@TabathaSouthey) February 29, 2016
The journos were coming.
Yes, Journo Twitter had arrived. Much like a pleasant happy-hour establishment that turns into an unpleasantly kinky pseudo-strip club at night (I watched too much Taffer again yesterday), journalists that generally use Twitter for fun or informative purposes turned into platitude-spouting company men/women after Spotlight took home its first award of the evening. And it continued.
— Sara Cress (@saracress) February 29, 2016
After years of being beaten down by shrinking budgets and news aggregators that dwarf traditional newspapers in revenue (despite the fact of that most of those sites would be quite screwed if traditional journalism vanished), the old guard of print journalism was ready to hold up Spotlight the way most normal people act when they get on the local news or see their name in the local paper. "Look, see? It's me! It's us!"I picked a great day to re-watch Spotlight. Now go buy a newspaper!— Meghan Hurley (@meghan_hurley) February 29, 2016
You ADD-stricken ingrates will watch a massive screen for two hours, but won't plunk down good money to get a daily dose of "School board meeting ends in impasse" flung at your door five minutes after you leave for work, guaranteeing that any story that bore even a slight influence on your life will be quite outdated by the time you return. You dumb millennials and your Dumb Phones and your dumbness. So dumb.If you liked two-hour Hollywood movie Spotlight, you'll love subscribing for a year to a daily print newspaper in your town.— Jacob Boon (@RWJBoon) February 29, 2016
Spotlight's first Oscar of the night is the reason you be buying a newspaper tomorrow morning or starting a subscription.— Allen Panzeri (@allenpanzeri2) February 29, 2016
Yeah! You guys are journalists, like me, and you did it, which is by extension a feather in my cap, too! In a way, this movie depicting journalists in another city who put forth a Herculean effort to find one of the biggest scandals of the century is much like the review I just did of the new Sea World exhibit. That Shamu is just so playful!Spotlight love!!! So proud of my newspaper people.— Hannah Sampson (@hannahbsampson) February 29, 2016
If you're happy that Spotlight won an Oscar, make sure to subscribe to your local newspaper. #Oscars— Bryan Lowry (@BryanLowry3) February 29, 2016
If you enjoyed #Spotlight you might also enjoy subscribing to an actual newspaper. #Oscars— Danny Hajjar (@DannyGHajjar) February 29, 2016
It sure is weird that all these wordsmiths and defenders of the printed page came up with the exact same joke about Spotlight and nobody liking newspapers anymore.So everyone who's excited about "Spotlight" winning will subscribe to a local newspaper now, right?— Gerry Smith (@gerryfsmith) February 29, 2016
You mean like Shattered Glass?If Mad Max is going to lose to anything, let it be to a movie about newspapers— Bruce Arthur (@bruce_arthur) February 29, 2016
Who are...what? Are you even a human being?Movie about newspapers takes first #Oscar2016 Take that, you newspaper haters! :) #Spotlight— Rod Mickleburgh (@rodmickleburgh) February 29, 2016
Listen, though I'm not a professional journalist, I do fancy a career in media and wrote for a (college) publication for a few years. I like newspapers. I like reading the news. I don't have a newspaper subscription in part for the reasons I've mentioned. Maybe I'll try again; newspapers so royally screwed the pooch over 20 years ago when the Internet became a thing that they still haven't figured out how to reliably monetize web content, so I'd like to "support the cause" or whatever.
But Journo Twitter taking fraternal pride in Spotlight winning an Academy Award is hilarious because a. they treat the success of The Boston Globe, one of the oldest, largest and most prestigious major-metropolis newspapers in our country's history, as a reason to go out and grab a copy of the Daily Dink tomorrow morning, and b. anecdotally, journos are exactly the type of people who complain about how movies based on true stories compress and distort the facts in a way that warps the tale's truth.
You know who is allowed to take pride in the movie's critical acclaim? The actual friggin' journalists who unearthed the scandal in the first place.
Investigative reporting is in crisis right now. Journalism is in crisis. The movie lets people know why what we do is so important.Now there's someone I'm inclined to listen to.
No comments:
Post a Comment