Oil and Gas Industry Tries to Block Gasland from Oscar

The New York Times is reporting that the big and powerful oil and gas companies have contacted Academy members urging them not to vote for the film:

“The filmmaker alternates between misstating and outright ignoring basic and verifiable facts related to the impact of these activities on the health and welfare of humans, wildlife and the environment,” said Lee Fuller, executive director of Energy in Depth (EID), in a¬†letter (pdf) today to the academy.

But Fox says his documentary is “backed up by facts 100 percent,” and it is the industry that perpetuates falsehoods.

“Gasland exposes what they’ve been doing and they don’t like it,” Fox said in an interview today. “EID is a smear organization, a PR firm that has nothing to do with reality.”

No shit. ¬†Let’s first and pause to acknowledge Gasland was made at all let alone nominated for an Academy Award. ¬†The Oscars do a lot wrong but every once in a while something like this makes them much more valuable. ¬†The Oscars themselves can draw attention to, from what I gather, is a bullying practice of cowing homeowners into signing over their land for “fracking.” ¬†And even if they don’t sign over their land for the use, many of the their neighbors have already done so, rending their own land vulnerable to environmental harms of the practice.

Dangerous business trying to contact Academy members, however, namely because it never works. ¬†The Academy members who vote on the docs can only vote if they’ve seen all of the nominees. ¬†That means they are kind of PR proof. ¬†Still, this news can only be good publicity for Gasland.

The only part of the article I have a beef with is this sentence: “But charges of inaccuracy dogged the nomination of the 1999 Denzel Washington film “Hurricane,” which then did not win an Oscar.” I’d say it’s apples and oranges; Hurricane was an overly long, sloppy movie overall with a great performance by Denzel Washington. The inaccuracies hurt it where they surely won’t hurt The King’s Speech (the latest is that Churchill approved of King Edward’s affair with Wallis Simpson) in the least, just as it wouldn’t have hurt The Social Network; they are not necessarily voting for it because it’s “true,” but because it’s good.