The Academy Awards were last night. Did your favorite picture win?

The Academy Awards were last night. Did your favorite picture win?

When I was younger you could not keep my wife and I from the movies. We did not see every picture that came out, but came close. Although we took different paths and arrived at slightly different conclusions, we watch very few movies these days. In the past year, we saw one move in the movie theaters -- and would tell you we wish now we had skipped that one. We do occassionally rent a DVD and watch at home, but even then they are few.

Our first rule is no R rated movies. This makes it easy to keep away from the true filth of the world, whether that means language, violence, sexual scenes, obviously bad worldviews, etc. This does not make it easy however to help us determine which movies to view. The PG-13s are getting closer to R every day. It is just a matter of the entertainment companies continually pushing the window to help you become acclimated to violence, sex, worldviews and the like so that you accept them as being within the parameters of PG-13.

The easy way to police this group is to either not watch PG-13 or not go to the movies.

I make these observations because last night was the Academy Awards. Ten years ago we would have watched the show start to finish and would have been able to provide opinions on 98% of the categories.

This year worldviews dominated the early advertising for the Awards -- by this I point to all of the articles about Brokeback Mountain, a movie about two gay cowboys.

Now my skepticism arrives when I viewed my MSN homepage this morning. Over the time span since the announcement of the contenders there have appeared numerous "articles" which could be interpreted as supporting giving this film all of the Awards for which it was nominated. This, in a politically correct world, would be affirmation of the film's message.

I cannot help but notice that there are no front page links to any stories about the Academy Awards on mymsn.com homepage, a homepage loaded with links to all of the major local and national news sources, as well as topics such as Today on MSN and MSN Top Entertainment Headlines.

I cannot help but ask why? Could it be that since their blazing star, Brokeback Mountain, failed to reap a landslide the correct political approach is to bury the news on the back pages so the nation does not notice the failure of the industry to totally support this film? The film did win three Awards, including best director. Any film should be pleased to have done this well.

Yet, in an era when gay rights is a political potato, often off-set against religions, especially Christianity, I am skeptical that the victories (the Award nominations) are front page news for several weeks, but the defeats (or apparent defeats) fail to make the front page.

Makes you consider the "fairness" of the news.

Not that I think the news is fair.

Just a thought.

Jim A.