Hollywood goes green at pre-Oscar party
Sandy Cohen

LOS ANGELES—Salma Hayek, Oliver Stone, Bill Maher and Adrian Grenier were among the stars who toasted Hollywood’s commitment to the environment at the 5th annual Global Green pre-Oscar party. The event, held Wednesday at Avalon nightclub, featured earth-friendly furniture and lighting, organic cocktails and performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice and the Oscar-nominated stars of “Once,” Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova.
Hayek, who serves on the local Global Green board, said she is more focused on environmental initiatives since becoming a mother. Her daughter, Valentina Paloma Pinault, was born last September. “I get a bigger fear of what kind of world she’s going to live in. Is she going to run out of water? What kind of water is she going to drink?” the 41-year-old actress and producer said on her way into the party. “It’s really scary and it’s not that far away if we don’t do something about it.”
The event raised $420,000, said spokesman Ruben Aronin. But doesn’t a big Hollywood bash leave a sizable carbon footprint?
Yes, said Aronin, but it’s worth it.
“As a fundraiser, the dollars that are raised are helping us dramatically to reduce carbon footprints across the country through our work to green New Orleans and create a green-building infrastructure here in Los Angeles,” he said. “We have the unique opportunity here in Hollywood to use the megaphone of celebrity to inspire and educate hundreds of millions of people around the world.” Global Green USA, the national branch of the worldwide environmental organization founded in 1993 by Mikhail Gorbachev, aligned itself with celebrities in a big way when it established its Red Carpet/Green Cars campaign five years ago. Leonardo DiCaprio, Charlize Theron, Tom Hanks and Susan Sarandon are among those who have opted to take fuel-efficient vehicles to the Oscar ceremony.
Brad Pitt is also involved with the group, working with Global Green to build sustainable housing in storm-ravaged New Orleans. Global Green’s Red Carpet/Green Cars effort will continue Sunday at the 80th Academy Awards. There will be gloom and doom at Oscars: Maybe it was the crippling writers’ strike or the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or was it something in the expensive bottled water in Beverly Hills where Oscar organizers are based.
Whatever it is, Hollywood’s on a big downer these days, and this year’s nominations for the world’s top film honours, the Oscars, reflect the sombre mood that has blanketed Tinseltown. Want betrayal, revenge, doomed love, murder and despair? Go see best film nominees “No Country for Old Men,” “Atonement,” “Michael Clayton” and “There Will Be Blood?”
Prefer paralysis and disease? Try “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” which earned Julian Schnabel a best director nod, or documentary nominee “SiCKO” from director Michael Moore. Howard Sober, founding chair of UCLA’s Film and Television Producers Program and author of “The Power of Film,” said he has never seen a bleaker view of human nature in a group of films since the French cinema of the 1960s.
“A film like ‘There Will Be Blood’ is decidedly un-American,” he said. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis as sadistic oil prospector in the early 20th century who will do anything to create wealth and gain power. The inclusion of teen pregnancy comedy “Juno” in the best picture category lightens the grim mood, and not surprisingly, it’s the only bona fide box office hit among the bunch, so far grossing $125 million in the United States and Canada.
“No Country” has about half that amount at $61 million. “Blood” has mustered only $32 million, so far, and they are the most-nominated movies with eight Oscar nods apiece.
GOOD MOVIES, LOW BOX OFFICE
This year’s five nominees for best film look likely to score the second-lowest box office total for the group in 20 years, with their ticket sales equalling an anemic 3 percent of the overall 2007 domestic box office of around $9.7 billion. Many of 2007’s big hits — “Spider-Man,” “Transformers,” “Knocked Up” and “Superbad” — were escapist fantasies and raunchy comedies, “mostly aimed at 11-year-olds, like most movies,” said Los Angeles Daily News film critic Bob Strauss.
The some 5,800 voters at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, however, are adults who work in the industry and favour serious dramas that look at complex questions of human nature, which is why a movie like “No Country,” a meditation on declining society morals, scores well with Oscar voters. But regular moviegoers, said Suber, don’t want to face the reality of the world, which right now includes the war on terrorism, the U.S. housing crisis and an ailing economy.
“Audiences don’t want to see realistic films about the war in Iraq. They want to escape all the bad news,” Suber said. Leonard Maltin, film critic and historian for celebrity TV show “Entertainment Tonight,” said the disconnect between Oscar voters and general movie fans — as judged by box office — is the result of Hollywood making “safe” movies. Films like the “Spider-Man,” “Shrek” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequels have built-in audiences and storytelling formulas that studios rely on to boost ticket sales. Maltin and the Daily News’ Strauss agreed that one of the academy’s roles at Oscar time is to distinguish between those type of popcorn flicks and award-worthy artistic films. “They’re supposed to judge quality, and quality’s rare,” said Strauss, “That said, I thought “Transformers” really kicked butt”.