A word of advice to future Oscar winners: Don't begin Oscar day by going to church.
That is where I found myself this past Sunday morning, at the Church of the Good Shepherd on Santa Monica Boulevard, at Mass with my sister and my dad. My problem with the Catholic Mass is that sometimes I find my mind wandering after I hear something the priest says, and I start thinking all these crazy thoughts like how it is wrong to kill people and that you are not allowed to use violence upon another human being unless it is in true self-defense.
The pope even came right out and said it: This war in Iraq is not a just war and, thus, it is a sin.
Those thoughts were with me the rest of the day, from the moment I left the church and passed by the homeless begging for change (one in six American children living in poverty is another form of violence), to the streets around the Kodak Theater where antiwar protesters were being arrested as I drove by in my studio-sponsored limo.
I had not planned on winning an Academy Award for "Bowling for Columbine" (no documentary that was a big box-office success had won since "Woodstock"), and so I had no speech prepared. I'm not much of a speech-preparer anyway, and besides, I had already received awards in the days leading up to the Oscars and used the same acceptance remarks. I spoke of the need for nonfiction films when we live in such fictitious times. We have a fictitious president who was elected with fictitious election results. (If you still believe that 3,000 elderly Jewish Americans -- many of them Holocaust survivors -- voted for Pat Buchanan in West Palm Beach in 2000, then you are a true devotee to the beauty of fiction!) He is now conducting a war for a fictitious reason (the claim that Saddam Hussein has stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction when in fact we are there to get the world's second-largest supply of oil).
Whether it is a tax cut that is passed off as a gift to the middle class or a desire to drill holes in the wilds of Alaska, we are continually bombarded with one fictitious story after another from the Bush White House. And that is why it is important that filmmakers make nonfiction, so that all the little lies can be exposed and the public informed. An uninformed public in a democracy is a sure-fire way to end up with little or no democracy at all.
