Well, it’s that time of year again. Spring break? No. It’s time for my annual take on the Oscars, Hollywood, and this year’s movies!

This is my third blog on the Oscars and you students respond to this subject more than any of the others. Afs you may know, I am no fan of the Oscar ceremonies that take place next week in what amounts to a pagan festival. My deep love of the movies probably makes my emotions all the more visceral.

Movies can be so great. I remembfer as a college student walking for hours outdoors, well past midnight, after I watched Deer Hunter (with Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken, and Meryl Streep). The beauty of the movie mesmerized me and it remains my all-time favorite. There are also times in life when you want mindless diversion, and the cinema can be great for that, too.

I was reminded of this earlier this month when I was walking with three fellow Catholic college presidents for dinner in downtown Washington and we saw a very long line of young people snaking through the streets and around buildings. I thought it was for a professional hockey or basketball game because we were near the arena, but in fact it was the line for admission to the cinema. This scene is replayed over and over across America – we all want entertainment, and I would argue, need entertainment from time to time.

Hollywood, however, is not content with simply entertaining. It wants to indoctrinate. It has its creed and sticks relentlessly to it. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are rare.

For the most part, Hollywood’s creed is about the glorification of personal pleasure and a “this life is all there is” ethos. It holds that the interests of adults are more important than the interests of children. So of course children are viewed as a burden and marriage is eschewed as unnecessary. Hollywood also tenaciously blurs the lines between the sexes so that gender distinctions are irrelevant. As for human life, it is viewed not as sacred but as dispensable – witness the gore fests at the cinema and the sympathetic treatment of abortion. Organized religion is mocked and the presence of God in the world is denied. The Catholic Church, in particular, is a frequent object of satire or derision.

You don’t believe me? Let’s look at the lineup of movies in 2008 to test my thesis.

But first, I have to state that I didn’t see many of the movies that I mention below. Some I didn’t want to see or wasn’t able to see, and some I felt I could not see in good conscience. I love the web site “pluggedinonline.com” because it gives you a detailed report on the ingredients of every movie – much the way that nutrition facts tell you how much fat, cholesterol and protein are in the package. Pluggedinonline.com is an excellent resource for parents wanting to determine whether a movie that is PG-13 is really PG-16. If you ever have left a movie discouraged about content that you would have avoided had you known, pluggedinonline.com is the only way I know of finding out in detail, in advance, how uplifting or debauched a movie is.

So with that established, I’ll start with how Hollywood in 2008 treated the Catholic Church.

Did you see Doubt? I did. It received 5 Oscar nominations. Who were the two main characters? Why of course, Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius – one a suspected pedophile priest and the other a joyless, lying, blackmailing nun. It wasn’t exactly a flattering portrait of the Church or religious life – or in my opinion a very good movie for that matter.

But Doubt had nothing on the X-Files movie, which took first prize in slandering the priesthood with Fr. Joe, a priest who at age 26 castrated himself and who, we’re told, violated 36 altar boys. Now, like you, I am appalled by any instance of pedophilia, and especially where a priest was involved. I am glad the Church has taken steps in how it handles this terrible problem. But the data shows that the great majority of abuse cases occurred decades ago, whereas Hollywood wants you to believe that it is as prevalent today. Perhaps Hollywood feels that holy, dedicated priests are the exception rather than the rule (they should come to Saint Vincent). So Hollywood’s take on Catholic priests is that if they aren’t pedophiles then they are portrayed as worldly or weak. One exception was in Gran Torino – the priest there at least had some spine.

Why does Hollywood love to defame the Catholic Church and present its gravest sins as commonplace? Because the Church’s values and Hollywood’s are night and day apart. The Church heralds marriage and family and a pro-life ethic. It condemns adultery and considers pre-marital sex grave sin. So it is no wonder that Hollywood relishes the opportunity to go after the messenger (and its flaws) as a way to mute the message.

Look at how Joseph and Mary were treated in a nativity play in Four Christmases. Can you imagine the uproar if Islam or Judaism were satirized in this way?

You may say, “Lighten up, President Towey. Where’s your sense of humor! They were just joking.” I know, I know. Trust me, I like a good satire and a good sight gag. But take the new Pink Panther 2 movie that is rated PG and will introduce millions of impressionable young children to a pretty determined ridicule of the Pope, Vatican, and Catholic religious traditions. My point is that it is fair to ask why Hollywood goes after priests and nuns and cherished Christian icons but doesn’t touch those of other faiths.

And if you think the Catholic Church took it on the chin this year, wait for when Angels and Demons comes out – the latest in Catholic-hating Dan Brown’s series. It is to the Da Vinci Code what Friday the 13th part 11 is to, well, Friday the 13th part 12.

Nothing is off-limits in Hollywood, not even the developmentally disabled. This year Tropic Thunder, which grossed over $100 million, made fun of the developmentally disabled (whom the Ben Stiller character simply called “retards”). That was considered fair game and cutting edge humor. So was the use of severed heads and splattered guts.

Speaking of gratuitous violence, Hollywood hit some new lows this year. I am not talking just about the teen fright/slasher fests and Hellboy this and My Bloody Valentine that.

And I am not talking about Dark Knight (which I thought was well-done, particularly Heath Ledger’s performance) or Quantum of Solace (also a huge box office hit and for the most part, a PG-13 movie appropriate for a 13 year old, which is a real rarity).

I am talking about mainstream, Oscar-nominated releases. Like Changeling. This dreadfully long film features a mass murderer of children who conscripted a young boy to help in the carnage. In one disturbing flashback scene it shows the young boy wielding an ax as he dismembers and kills some of the children. Popcorn anyone?

Children used to be off limits when it came to acts of graphic depravity, but in Hollywood and its quest for things new and shocking, they had to move the lines. So in Slumdog Millionaire, nominated for 10 Oscars, you get visuals of a child being mutilated and another plunging into a pit of raw sewage and running over the hill covered from head to toe in human excrement. Who wants Raisinets?

In The Reader, nominated for 5 Oscars, you have a 15 year old boy statutorily raped by a 30-something woman (whose name he did not know until their third tryst). In Role Models, you have a 10 year old boy dropping the F-bomb repeatedly, watching adults have sex and being mentored in the art. In Sex and the City, you have a 5 year old girl, answering the character Carrie’s cell phone by saying “Sex!”.

This all is keeping with a trend where Hollywood has steadily moved toward a greater and greater sexualization of children and adolescents. Among Oscar winners in recent memory, we had the little girl strip teasing in Little Miss Sunshine, and Kevin Spacey seducing his teenage daughter’s friend in American Beauty.

The teen movies today are all about sex. There are three million teenage girls who have a sexually transmitted disease (at least one in four, according to the CDC in a March report) but Hollywood will say that it doesn’t create the atmosphere of promiscuity, it simply reflects it.

The truth is, Hollywood does both. Think of the mind-numbing stories of how a Portland, Maine school board approved a measure allowing middle-school students to gain access to prescription birth control (October 18, 2007 New York Times) – despite the fact that only 5 of the middle school’s 500 children reported being sexually active. That fact didn’t stop 10 of the 12 adults on the school board who thought this new policy was needed. They, too, have bought into the Hollywood mantra that teens are like animals in heat instead of human beings made in the image of God who are gifted with free will to govern themselves and make sound moral choices.

The only sex you don’t see in the cinema is sex between husbands and wives. That is because Hollywood for the most part hates marriage. A number of movies this year ended with the main characters deciding not to marry but instead to live together – Mama Mia, Role Models, and Four Christmases, to name three. In the latter, the Vince Vaughan character says marriage “is a time bomb waiting to explode.”

In Revolutionary Road, a set in the ‘50’s flick of a married couple with two kids, that’s precisely what happened. Yes, they had children, but in Hollywood, children are not what marriage is all about – personal happiness and fulfillment is. The kids seldom appeared in the movie – the storyline was all about the parents’ unfulfilled dreams and the growing tension between them. So they started having affairs and their marriage disintegrated, and then the wife found out she was pregnant. What does she do? She performs an abortion on herself in the bathroom and she dies, along with her unborn baby. I am not making this up.

Don’t get me wrong. I love movies with an edge and characters with grit. This year Anne Hathaway, as a recovering addict in Rachel Getting Married, and Mickey Rourke, a pro wrestler in the twilight of his career in The Wrestler, were impressive. I saw them both and they weren’t easy to see – in The Wrestler I found myself closing my eyes at a number of parts because I didn’t want to see the disturbing images. So even with movies that are well done, Hollywood finds a way to infect them with segments of soft-porn or human degradation so that you leave the theater wanting to forget what you just saw.

Is it any wonder that the number of moviegoers this past year was down 4%? And if Batman and Bond, Indiana Jones and Kung Fu Panda, and Hancock and Horton had not saved the day, it would have been considerably worse.

There were some movies, like Valkyrie, that took serious subjects but did not succumb to the temptation to immerse the plot and characters in violence and sex. I took three of my sons to it and didn’t have to cringe once. The language wasn’t over the top. The acting was solid (and I’m not a Tom Cruise fan even though I met with him at the White House once – hey, it’s a Hollywood piece so I’ll engage in some name dropping!). And of course, Valkyrie bombed at the box office.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button fared better with ticket buyers and secured 13 Oscar nominations. I didn’t get to see all of it but what I saw looked like a pretty serious look at death and dying and the quest for meaning in lifef (although the Hollywood staple of adultery was never far from any of the main characters’ lives). It had moments of beauty and I'll bet it wins the Oscar.

All in all, I think 2008 was a pretty dark year at the cinemas. I tip my hat to the people who are making the Narnia movies and to the others in Hollywood who are trying to buck the tide of Hollywood’s steady descent into atheistic humanism.

Let me hear from you on what you think about the movies and what I wrote, and also, what your favorite flicks were.

I leave with you something to think about that was written by a pretty famous actor:

“With loving regard, the divine Artist passes on to the human artist a spark of his own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in his creative power.

Artists…must labour without allowing themselves to be driven by the search for empty glory or the craving for cheap popularity, and still less by the calculation of some possible profit for themselves.

In the modern era, alongside this Christian humanism which has continued to produce important works of culture and art, another kind of humanism, marked by the absence of God and often by opposition to God, has gradually asserted itself.

The Church needs art…Mine is an invitation to rediscover the depth of the spiritual and religious dimension which has been typical of art in its noblest forms in every age.

Artists of the world, may your many different paths all lead to that infinite Ocean of beauty where wonder becomes awe, exhilaration, unspeakable joy.”

The actor? His Holiness Pope John Paul II, who built a solid reputation as an actor in Krakow's underground theater during World War II. He wrote these words in his “Letter to Artists” written 10 Easter Sundays ago.

Because you are a student at a Catholic, Benedictine liberal arts college, you might benefit from reading it. It will remind you of the irresistible attraction of beauty and its origin, and our call within our culture to cultivate it.

You will leave Saint Vincent one day and encounter a culture that too often denies the existence of God and degrades the dignity of man. You will have a choice – conform to this culture or work to change it.

I hope you find time during your days at Saint Vincent to inform your conscience, develop your critical thinking skills, and deepen your desire to make a difference in the world.

You may not be called to work in Hollywood and transform its values, but you are called to witness to the truth Pope John Paul II conveyed about what constitutes beauty – and how to preserve it.