Why are so many films so bad, former Vietnam war correspondent John Pilger writes in the New Statesman (London). "This year's Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty," he writes. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America's divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory. Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is in this tradition, Pilger says. "A favourite for multiple Oscars, her film is 'better than any documentary I've seen on the Iraq war. It's so real it's scary' (Paul Chambers, CNN). What nonsense. This film offers a vicarious thrill through yet another standard-issue psychopath, high on violence in somebody else's country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion."  By contrast Pilger draws attention to the fate of what he calls an admirable American war film, Redacted, as instructive. The film is based on the true story of the gang rape of an Iraqi teenager and the murder of her family by U.S. marines. "There is no heroism, no purgative. The murderers are murderers," Pilger writes. "The great irony about Redacted is that it was redacted." After a limited release in the U.S., the film all but vanished. Non-American (or non-Western) humanity is not deemed to have box-office appeal, dead or alive. "My Oscar for the worst of this year's nominees goes to Invictus, Clint Eastwood's unctuous insult to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa," Pilger writes. Eastwood gives barely a hint that many black South Africans were deeply embarrassed and hurt by Mandela's embrace of the hated springbok symbol of their suffering. As for the Boer racists, they have hearts of gold, because they 'didn't really know'. At first I thought Invictus could not be taken seriously, but then I looked around the cinema at young people and others for whom the horrors of apartheid have no reference, and I understood the damage such a slick travesty does to our memory and its moral lessons." The film most nominated for an Oscar and promoted by the critics is Up in the Air, which stars George Clooney as a man who travels the U.S. sacking people and collecting frequent-flyer points. "This is 'a movie for our times', says the director, Jason Reitman, who boasts about having cast real sacked people. 'We interviewed them about what it was like to lose their job in this economy', said he, 'then we'd fire them on-camera and ask them to respond the way they did when they lost their job . . . It was an incredible experience to watch these non-actors with 100 percent realism.'" "Wow," cries Pilger, "what a winner." - New Statesman