Somehow Hollywood just keeps finding ways to make their upcoming Oscar Awards in March as politicized as possible. First there are the films in competition for the main awards, which include such Red State favorites as Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck, Munich, and Brokeback Mountain. Then there's the choice of Jon Stewart from Comedy Central's Daily Show as the host.

And for the piece de résistance, as they say in Old Europe, last week, it was announced that the Academy will be awarding an honorary Oscar to Robert Altman.

Yes, the same Robert Altman who said in 2002:

This present government in America I just find disgusting, the idea that George Bush could run a baseball team successfully--he can't even speak! I just find him an embarrassment. I was over here [Britain] when the election was on and I couldn't believe it -and I'm 76 years old. Then when the Supreme Court came in and turned out to be a totally political animal, the last shred of any naiveté that was left in me has gone. When I see an American flag flying, it's a joke."

And of course, like everyone else in Hollywood in 2000, also said, "If George W. Bush is elected president, I'm leaving for France."

Didn't quite happen, of course.

On the one hand, Altman actually is a very innovative director: he took overlapping dialogue, something that Orson Welles helped pioneer, to a new level, lending an impressive verisimilitude to his best films. His films are typically built around theater-like ensemble casts, rather than the typical Hollywood formula of one or two leading men and an army of mostly featureless extras.

But unlike Steven Spielberg or George Lucas at the heights of their careers, it would be unfair to accuse of Altman of actually having his finger on the pulse of a nation he so clearly loves. If you study the box office returns of his many films over the years on the Internet Movie Database, he's had only three major hits in the course of a movie career that's into its fifth decade: M*A*S*H in 1970, Nashville in 1975 (at least I remember it as a hit--there's no box office info on its IMDB page) and Gosford Park in 2001. For the most though, Altman's career has sustained off his name, not his bankability.

In Easy Rider, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind writes that in the late '70s, "the Star Wars profits made it possible for [then-20th Century Fox studio head Alan Ladd Jr.] to shelter Altman during the second half of the decade". When his infamous 1980 version of Popeye crashed and burned (nearly permanently ruining Robin Williams' cinematic career in the process), Altman was effectively done in Hollywood for most of the 1980s, producing quirky, theatrical, very low-budget films (such as Secret Honor, a one man show starring Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon). Only the modest success of The Player in 1990 brought Altman back into Hollywood's good graces.

But in terms of cultural impact, M*A*S*H of course, was Altman's biggest hit, and still arguably his best film. Despite its filmmakers' best intentions, it's not anti-war as much as it's the original anti-idiotarian movie. (Somewhat like Hollywood's later uneasy relationship with Tom Clancy, it didn't hurt that Richard Hornberger, the author of the book it was based on, was a conservative Republican who, like Hawkeye Pierce, served in Korea, but unlike Altman or Alan Alda's later take on Hawkeye, was firmly on the side of the freedom during the Cold War.)

Speaking of Alda, of course, M*A*S*H is remembered even more fondly for the TV series it inspired. I remember reading an interview once with Larry Gelbart, who created and originally produced the M*A*S*H TV series, and he said that he met Altman at a party once and asked him why he hated the series. Altman told him it was largely because he didn't participate in it financially. Which is why, on his director's commentary on the M*A*S*H movie DVD, Altman is astonishingly harsh to a TV series beloved by millions and millions, no matter what their views on war are:

I didn't like the [TV] series, because that series to me was the opposite of my main reason for making this film. And this was to talk about a foreign war, an Asian war that was going on at the time. And to perpetuate that at the time for 12 years. And no matter what platitudes they say their little messages and everything, the basic image and message is that the brown people with the narrow eyes are the enemy. So I think that series was a quite a racist thing. I didn't approve of it, I don't like it, and I thought it was the antithesis of what we were trying to do. But most people don't even know that this film exists. If you polled the world, they'd say, oh, that was that series with Alan Albert, or whatever his name was.

The M*A*S*H TV series, particularly in its later years was certainly, explicitly anti-Korean War--and of course, anti-Vietnam War. But it's tough for me to look back on it (and I've watched it endlessly in reruns) as being racist.

But maybe one reason why Fox didn't involve Altman in the series was because of his uncompromising geopolitical mind:

I mean, all of the level of the humor and the jokes in the film M*A*S*H are very crude. It was loaded with sexist and bathroom jokes and low humor. But our attitude was nothing was as obscene or as low humor as the destruction of these young men. And these guys--what's the point trying to put 'em back together again and then send them out to be blow up again in some war that nobody, that was strictly a political situation. Our security was never endangered, we were never in danger of being attacked. It was all terror that people like Joe McCarthy and the general rightwing set-up.

Joe McCarthy died in 1957. While there's no doubt Democrats have moved much more to the left than their point on the political compass in the early to mid-'60s, it's rather amusing to consider JFK and LBJ as part of the right wing--and certainly not as Altman conceives them, with the ghost of McCarthy and Nixon lurking behind every corner.

More Altman, also from the M*A*S*H director's commentary:

I remember speaking at a college--oh, I remember an auditorium with about 5000 or so people in Wisconsin, and somebody got up and said, "Why do you treat women the way that you do--you're a misogynist!"

I said, well, I said, I don't treat women that way. I'm showing you the way that I observed that women were treated. And that is the way that women were treated, and still are treated. And especially when you get into these army situations, where you've got males with egos with 14-year-old development.

As opposed to Hollywood, that enlightened bastion of equality. Where sexism, chauvinism, and especially males with 14-year-old egos are all parts of a dimly remembered past. Just ask Warren Beatty.

The New York Times once called Altman's M*A*S*H, "the first American comedy to openly ridicule religion". And not coincidentally, this was the one area where the M*A*S*H TV series, for the most part, did refuse to tread, for fear of upsetting both the sponsors and censors. Ironically, all things considered, the Father Mulcahy character in the TV series was probably treated far better than he would be if a M*A*S*H-like series were being made today.

And far better than Altman's M*A*S*H movie, which had Donald Sutherland's Hawkeye and Tom Skerritt's Duke Forrest character openly mocking Frank Burns' prayer as childlike. Altman's response?

There were some religious people and groups who got after us, and they said, oh, we shouldn't treat the Catholic chaplain this way, and blah, blah, blah. You know, the usual, the usual.

That's the spirit, Bob! As I said, Hollywood has made a truly inspired choice to cap-off a year in which they effectively told anybody whose views are to the right of Howard Dean's to just stay home.

So how will they top it? Well, coming later this year is Altman's next film: the movie version of A Prairie Home Companion written by Garrison Keillor. The day after the 2004 election, Keillor told a Chicago audience:

"I'm trying to organize support for a constitutional amendment to deny voting rights to born-again Christians," Keillor smirked. "I feel if your citizenship is in Heaven-like a born again Christian's is-you should give up your citizenship. Sorry, but this is my new cause. If born again Christians are allowed to vote in this country, then why not Canadians?"

Blah, blah, blah. You know, the usual, the usual.