Some groups (Christians and liberals) have called foul when the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced their nominations for the 2005 Oscars earlier this week, and their favorite agenda films The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 were nowhere to be found. The greater mystery, if you ask any film fan in the know, is how the Academy could criminally overlook the short film masterpiece “Unmapped Island,” released in 2004 just in time for the Oscars by film auteur and commune employee Ted Ted.
“Unmapped Island,” released to poisonous reviews in early December 2004 by the independent film company Ted Ted Pictures, has been targeted for non-targeting by Hollywood elite, despite being completely original and elevating the film forum beyond the usual candy-ass picture Tinsel Town has been churning out for years. Meanwhile, tired biopics like The Aviator and Ray, and foxy boxing pictures like Million Dollar Baby steal the thunder from original films about one man pitted against nature and Nazis after surviving a shipwrecking.
Many were curious and highly pissed-off as to why a formidable new talent, perhaps even a genius(?), was completely passed over for the more traditional kind of slick-produced crap and prettyboy film star nonsense. Most notably, the director and writer himself, Ted Ted, called the move, “The same old Hollywood horseshit.”
Though troubled by bad reviews from critics who either simply didn’t get it or were too high-faluting to enjoy a movie that was great fun, “Unmapped Island,” starring non-Oscar-nominee for Best Actor Ted Ted and also non-Oscar-nominee for Best Supporting Actor Ramrod Hurley, sold out both of its showings in Flatbush, New Jersey, and looked “quite professional,” according to the theater owner and projectionist Randall Howard. The praise and audience approval falls on deaf ears in Hollywood, though, as letters go unanswered and phone calls unreturned by simple reporters trying to find out the facts for a story. Still, one has to wonder: Is Hollywood completely oblivious to identifying new talent these days, or do they hold some deep-seated perverse prejudice against filmmaker Ted Ted?
It’s not the first time Hollywood has faced the Ted Ted controversy, and refused to answer perfectly reasonable questions about it. In 1999, Ted Ted’s first short film Monolog was roundly ignored by critics, on the preposterous grounds that no one in the academy had seen it and it broke minor technical regulations by not being quite finished, though director Ted Ted promised the money for being nominated for an Oscar would be enough to get it finished in time.
Most disappointing, according to director Ted Ted, since he can’t win an Oscar now by these ever-tightening Academy standards, he will never have the chance to respond to allegations by movie reviewer for the commune Orson Welch, who attacked the film as, “The most obvious attempt to rip-off both the television series ‘Lost’ and the movie The Great Escape ever to make it to any screen, even a local theater.”
“It’s a shame,” said Ted Ted, in a carefully-prepared press conference attended by this commune reporter. “If I had the opportunity, I would have liked to reply to Welch, and other critics, by telling them: ‘If you’re so goddamned brilliant, why don’t you go write your own movie and cast it and make it yourself with your hard-earned money? Oh, that’s right, I remember now why—you can’t. You’re all hacks and all your stuff comes out looking retarded. Retards.’”
No one in Hollywood returned any of this reporter’s calls, except for one press secretary representing Clint Eastwood, who asked us to please stop wasting her time.