My friend Christian Rocca, of the wonderful Italian newspaper il Foglio, recently did an interview that is worth thinking about. I’ve translated the main parts. If you want to read the whole thing in the original, go to Christian’s blog and read the article “That’s It”. Meanwhile, here are the things that caught my attention:

Franco Zerlenga, retired professor of the history of Isalm at NYU, has some thoughts about America: “To understand the spirit of the age, where America is headed, you have to look at the Oscars. That’s it…In 1943 they gave the prize to ‘Casablanca’…everyone thought the war was going badly, but the film told the story of an American and a Frenchman who won against a German general, who was killed, and that movie showed the true feelings of the Americans of that time: they wanted to defeat the Germans, whatever the difficulties. And the artistic and intellectual community of Hollywood recognized that, and rewarded the film that best represented that desire.” And today? There were lots of antiwar movies on the list, but they all lost. Instead, the awards went to “No Country for Old Men” in which, as Zerlenga says, “the Cohen brothers brilliantly tell the story of a lunatic terrorist who kills without giving any importance to life, paying no attention to human beings. The protagonist is the prototype of the terrorist who kills without wanting to assume any responsibility, flipping a coin, as if he were not deciding to take or save a life, exactly like the Arab Islamists. And, in fact, it won the Oscar.” “Then there’s ‘There Will be Blood,’ which is not a movie about the birth of American capitalism and the dangerous spread of the Evangelical churches, but rather a film about Saudi Arabia and its Islamist madrassas. The oil men are no longer us, the oil men are the Saudis.” “Then there’s ‘Juno,’ a pro-life movie about a little girl who decides not to have an abortion…Diablo Cody won for the best original screenplay, but really there is nothing original there. It’s subtle anti-abortion propaganda, but the Oscar shows that even in the most liberal sectors of America, like Hollywood, there is no longer hostility to these themes…In America, everything is possible, even a rat becomes a great chef, as in ‘Ratatouille.’ In Europe, they don’t want to see that in this country there is no single ideology. America is dynamic, open to the rest of the world..and in fact awards were given to Spanish and French actors, and Italian screenwriters. That’s it.”