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The fact that the Oscar's just awarded numerous awards upon "The Departed", an adaptation of another film, underscores the lack of new ideas in mainstream cinema. This is by no means a new development in big budget, lots-of-marketing-power, Hollywood production. Even if a fresh idea does come to town, unless it's guided by someone with clout it will probably be relegated to production hell where any semblance of originality is methodically beaten out of it by studio executives and contracted screenwriters dying to make enough changes to get their own name on the script. The process that Hollywood uses to refine scripts into 'better' movies is responsible for the degradation of the entire art form.

Enter a new age, with production costs plummeting with the advance of the digital age young film makers can write/direct/edit with costs a fraction of what a Hollywood production spends on Starbucks. By circumventing Hollywood and making an independent production a film maker has a chance to be a true auteur, maintaining the artistic vision throughout the filmmaking process.
However, although it is getting easier and cheaper to make independant films, it has gotten any cheaper to market and distribute new films. A lot of good films get noticed in the festival circuit, but more and more Hollywood types desperate for artistic credibility use festivals as another marketing tool. (Not that this is all bad, sometimes they take this route to drum up support for a film that a studio doesn't want to spend marketing money on.)Meanwhile, the big theaters down the street plays "Babel" for a week and keeps the latest Hollywood retread for a month.
With more and more people buying big screen TVs and surround sound for their living rooms, maybe the answer is economic. If we stopped paying money to watch the shite that Hollywood insists is good, and put used our mad money to patron worthwhile art that as a culture we can be proud of.

Learn more about this author, Michael Coppedge.
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