How The Oscars Got It Wrong With American Sniper

So this week we have seen the release of the Oscar nominations and the film American Sniper. The Oscar nominations were as controversial as usual. They were viewed by many as the "white Oscars" for their lack of diversity - not only in ethnic minorities, but also in women.

The films up for Best Picture are male dominated and so is the Director's award. You look at the films that are featured in the Best Actress award: Wild, Gone Girl, The Theory of Everything, Still Alice and Two Days, One Night. With the exception of The Theory of Everything, these films have been snubbed in every other category.

But I'll give the Oscars the benefit of the doubt on this one, you get years where the good films are dominated by straight white males. Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel dominate the nominations and both films have been given very positive reviews. If anything, 2014-early 2015 has been a great period for good films with as many as 20 real contenders for Best Picture, but the Oscars, as ever, have managed to get at least one wrong.

Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel reflect some of the best films of the year

The inclusion of American Sniper.

The Clint Eastwood-directed film focuses on Chris Kyle, a US Navy SEAL who is believed to be the most lethal sniper in the US military's history with 160 confirmed kills. The film focuses on his life in the Iraq War and in between when he returns from tours. It is basically your run-of-the-mill war film that is almost ever-present at the Oscars.

The thing is, 2014-15 has been a great year for unique and boundary-pushing films. Fair enough we have the war film in American Sniper, the "boring" film in The Imitation Game, but we also had a comedy as one of the best films of the year - The Grand Budapest Hotel. Blockbusters like Interstellar and Gone Girl have been forgotten about despite their quality. This is because we have films like Birdman and Nightcrawler taking cinema into a different dimension. You had dark films like Foxcatcher keeping people intrigued. You had low-budget wonders like Boyhood and Whiplash giving us different stories and making potentially boring film ideas come to life. These are examples of just some of the great films that have came about in the past year.

Cooper is a convincing Kyle, but the film is flawed

American Sniper looks weak in comparison.

Don't get me wrong, American Sniper isn't a bad film, but it's a little average. In my humble opinion, a 6 or 7 out of 10. Bradley Cooper plays Chris Kyle well, but not enough to stop Jake Gyllenhaal from getting a nomination for his great performance in Nightcrawler. Even if we put to the side that this film isn't even in the top 10 films of the year, there are other reasons why it shouldn't have so many Oscar nominations.

Gyllenhaal was excellent as the mysterious Lou Bloom

One blatantly obvious observation is how 'Murican this film is. When I was in the cinema watching Unbroken, American Sniper came up in a preview. The first thing I said to my friends was "How can they make a film about an illegal war seem so good?" I noticed these Inglorious Basterds comparison even before Seth Rogen announced his opinion. Now that I have seen it, it makes sense. This is a propaganda film created by a Republican director (despite my hatred for Republican policies, I still find Eastwood great) who is trying to mask the illegal war through the memoirs of a biased soldier. This film seems less real and more patriotic propaganda when you read Chris Kyle's memoirs. He called the Iraqis "savages". Ok, fair enough that's an opinion of his opponents I could give him the benefit of the doubt on that one.

But he also lied about punching former wrestler Jesse Ventura claiming that he said that the SEALs deserved to "lose some". Ventura won a court case stating that he had never met Kyle. Kyle also claimed that he stood atop of the Superdome - home to the New Orlean Saints - after Hurricane Katrina and killed 30 armed civilians that he thought were causing trouble. There were no reports of these deaths. He also claimed to kill two people who tried to carjack him. Unsurprisingly this case also didn't exist.

A mix of lies from Kyle, political bias from Eastwood and a general lack of excitement in American Sniper really made it a flawed film trying to make a man who killed people look like a hero. You can make some people look like heroes in a war film, but you just can't see Kyle as a hero in this. He fought for the bad guys in the Iraq War just like Fredrick Zoller did for the Nazis in Inglorious Basterds. He was glorified as a hero for killing the enemy. He was doing his job. That makes him neither a villain or a hero, he just followed orders.

Uncanny (not that I thought Clint Eastwood would take ideas from a fictional Joseph Goebbels)

If we had made a film called "Iraqi Sniper" it would be too controversial. So why do we find it celebratory to applaud a man - who was on the wrong side of the conflict - for killing people defending their country? The media seems to work its magic sometimes.

All of the above shows why The Oscars aren't perfect. American Sniper looks shoddy next to Saving Private Ryan or Apocalypse Now. I mean, it's not even the best war film of the best year. That award goes to the far more intriguing Fury - a film that was actually realistic and not polished in patriotism.

So overall, I believe that it doesn't deserve any Oscars because it was a film with a total lack of ambition, lack of truth, lack of entertainment and taken from the wrong angle. Personally, if they had made the story more focused on his family, it could have been a hit - but it all seemed to either bore or frustrate me.

Chris Kyle was probably not a bad man, but it's very hard to believe that a pathological liar does not have flaws. American Sniper seems to make him Lincoln-esque, when really he was just like one of us with blood on his hands.