OPINION: Nothing tells you more about Hollywood than what it chooses to honour.
Nominated for best foreign film is Paradise Now, a sympathetic portrayal of two suicide bombers. Nominated for best picture is Munich, a sympathetic portrayal of yesterday's fashion in barbarism: homicide terrorism.
But until you see Syriana, nominated for best screenplay (and George Clooney, for best supporting actor) you have no idea how self-flagellation and self-loathing pass for complexity and moral seriousness in Hollywood.
Syriana's script has, of course, the classic liberal tropes such as this stage direction: "The Deputy National Security Advisor, Marilyn Richards, 40s, sculpted hair, with the soul of a 70-year-old white, Republican male, is in charge" (page 21). Or this piece of over-the-top, Gordon Gekko Republican-speak, placed in the mouth of a Texas oilman: "Corruption is our protection. Corruption is what keeps us safe and warm . . . Corruption . . . is how we win" (page 93).
But that's run-of-the-mill Hollywood. The true distinction of Syriana's script is the near-incomprehensible plot - a muddled mix of story lines about a corrupt Kazakhstan oil deal, a succession struggle in an oil-rich Arab kingdom and a giant Texas oil company that pulls the strings at the CIA and, naturally, everywhere else - amid which only two things are clear and coherent: the movie's one political hero and one pure soul.
The political hero is the Arab prince who wants to end corruption, inequality and oppression in his country. He intends to modernise his country by bringing the rule of law, market efficiency, women's rights and democracy.
What do you think happens to him? He, his beautiful wife and beautiful children are murdered, incinerated, by a remote-controlled missile, fired from CIA headquarters - at the very moment that his evil younger brother, the corrupt rival to the throne and puppet of the oil company, is being hailed at a suitably garish "oilman of the year" celebration populated by fat and ugly Americans.
What is grotesque about this moment of plot clarity is that the overwhelmingly obvious critique of actual US policy in the real Middle East today is its excess of Wilsonian idealism in trying to find and promote - against a tide of tyranny, intolerance and fanaticism - local leaders like the Good Prince.
Who in the greater Middle East is closest to Syriana's modernising, democratising paragon? Without a doubt, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a man of exemplary - and quite nonfictional - personal integrity, physical courage and democratic temperament.
Hundreds of brave American and Nato soldiers have died protecting him and the democratic system they established to allow him to govern. Last night, when the Oscars honoured Syriana, American soldiers were fighting, some perhaps dying, in defence of precisely the kind of tolerant, modernising Muslim leader that Syriana shows America slaughtering.
It gets worse. The most pernicious element in the movie is the character who is at the moral heart of the film: the physically beautiful, modest, caring, generous Pakistani who becomes a beautiful, modest, caring, generous . . . suicide bomber. In his final act, the Pure One, dressed in the purest white robes, takes his explosives-laden little motorboat head first into his target. It is a replay of the real-life boat that plunged into the USS Cole in 2000, killing 17 American sailors, except that in Syriana's version, the target is another symbol of American imperialism in the Persian Gulf - a newly opened liquefied natural gas terminal.
In my naiveness, I used to think that Hollywood had achieved its nadir with Oliver Stone's JFK, a film that taught a generation of Americans that President Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and the FBI in collaboration with Lyndon Johnson. But at least it was for domestic consumption, an internal affair of only marginal interest to other countries. Syriana, however, is meant for export, carrying the most vicious and pernicious mendacities about America to a receptive world.
Osama bin Laden could not have scripted this film with more conviction.