Wouldn’t it be great if “Inglourious Basterds” won Best Picture at the Academy Awards?
The conventional wisdom is that this year’s Oscar derby is a race between James Cameron’s “Avatar” and Kathryn Bigelow's “The Hurt Locker.”
Still, every race has a dark horse, and there have always been a few board-markers and tin-mittens that put their money and their hopes on Quentin Tarantino’s deftly dastardly rewriting of history.
Sure, “Inglourious Basterds” could win the Oscar because it is a good movie, Tarantino’s a great director and it’s ultimately an homage to the power of film. Certainly lesser films of lower ambition have won in the past.
However, what would be really great if “Inglourious Basterds” won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 82nd Academy Awards would be the message it would convey: the triumph of the mash-up.
Mash-ups have become one of the most influential and interesting genres of 21st-century culture, and in “Inglourious Basterds,” Tarantino has created a mash-up masterpiece.
Evolving out of hip-hop sampling, DJ remixing and the technological proliferation of easy-to-use software, mash-ups are basically the blending of one or more distinct elements or cultural products with another.
They first got a large audience in 2001 when a tune called "Stroke of Genius," which meshed the vocal from Christina Aguilera’s "Genie in a Bottle" with the melody from The Strokes "Hard to Explain,” was heard from the far corners of the internet.
Since then, in the hands of musicians, MCs, filmmakers, writers and kids in their basement with ProTools, mash-ups have began to realign not only how contemporary culture is created, but the very idea of art and the execution of inspiration. And, as all truly innovative artistic movements do eventually, mash-ups have emerged in the mainstream.
“Inglourious Basterds” wasn’t the only Hollywood mash-up movie this year. Both Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are” and Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” wove the genres to their own ends. However, as good as they both were, neither went anywhere as large as Tarantino.
Disparate elements of narrative, characters, linguistics, geography, cinema, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler and history as a concept and a fact were all melded together in “Basterds” to create something distinctively new, with an alternative fiery end to World War II that ultimately remixes the rest of the 20th century
Obviously “Inglourious Basterds'” bloody vengeance upon Adolf Hitler, whose 1945 suicide in a Berlin bunker with Eva Braun allowed the dictator to escape history’s clutches, was pretty fulfilling as grand historical rewrites go.
Fulfilling with serious implications.
As Hitler himself understood, movies are sometimes serious things, and sometimes what they create serious stories about ourselves. Within the next few years, as the last remaining WWII veterans and survivors die off and direct memories of that time fade, there will be a lot of people who will believe that Tarantino’s version of history is the true version of history. Not because they’re stupid, but because that’s the power of movies.
