[Posted in Bene Diction Blogs On Feb. 26th, 2014)
In the run-up to the Oscars, you may have noted that a song in the film Alone Yet Not Alone was nominated for an Oscar this year.
It was though to be quite a feather in the caps of the filmmakers, all ostensibly devout Christians. So, Christians were dismayed when the nomination was recently rescinded by the Academy. The makers of the song had broken Academy rules in campaigning for their song among Academy members voting for songs.
There was a bit of hue and cry. Hollywood is biased against us Christians! This rule would never have been enforced this way against...! As you would expect.
But, I want to bring attention to this issue in order to cite Peter T. Chattaway of the Patheos website. His follow-up post on the disqualification of the song, I think perhaps in this case points to what Paul Harvey used to call, on this radio show, "The Rest Of The Story."
In a few years, it could explain a lot.
Peter chattaway, unlike pretty well everyone else I have seen on this subject so far, connects some dots for us.
As he briefly notes in his post, the makers of Alone Yet Not Alone, tend to be hard core Dominionists. He has links as well.
In one paragraph of his post, he notes that "the film appears to have been backed by far-right activists known as dominionists or reconstructionists". Moreover, the film was made by a now defunct company named Vision Forum. The former head of that firm, Doug Phillips, had a prominent told in Alone Yet Not Alone, along with two of his daughters. Phillips appears to have been now edited out of Alone Yet Not Alone, according to blogger Katie Botkin, who has lots of useful background on the film.
Sorry for doing a "matcher", but I wanted to take the opportunity to speculate a little.
What follows is a guess.
Imagine for a moment that the Academy's leadership had only found out about the documented leanings of the filmmakers after the song had been nominated.
A perfect storm happens. The song wins, Then the filmmakers get up on the Oscar stage and talk about something like "we're taking back the mountain of Hollywood so Jesus can come back!"
So, there perhaps was incentive to strictly enforce an Academy rules regarding this song.
And Academy leaders, I imagine, Looked up gratefully to heaven and said "thank you Jesus."
If I am imagining well, then. you can't tell me there is no prayer in Hollywood.