Was there any faith at the Oscars?

Now that the Oscars hoopla is over and the statuettes have been handed out, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on how religion is portrayed – or not portrayed – these days in Hollywood. The answer as usual is, it depends on who you ask.

Cathleen Falsani, formerly a fellow religion journalist, specializes in the intersection of religion and pop culture. She runs the blog “This Numinous World,” and in her pre-Oscars post, she took a generous view of the best-picture nominees.

“This Oscar Sunday, in a year laden with stories that might change us if we allow them to, we all could say, ‘This movie made me think about my own life,’” she wrote.

Her choice for the Oscar was “Women Talking,” based on the true story of Mennonite women who were abused by their husbands and the choices they make in response. But here's what she said about the winner, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”: “In a multiverse of endless possibilities and endless opportunities to suffer or cause suffering, the film urges us to ‘be kind.’ That, then, is how we shall live.”

As a general ethical principle, it’s hard to argue with that, and all the major religions teach such principles. But ethics is not the same as a practicing belief, and that is where things get problematic. The critic Joseph Holmes, writing on the online news magazine Religion Unplugged, took a dimmer view.

This year’s films, he wrote, “have largely given up on real religion. Portrayals of religion in the real world are almost exclusively cartoonishly negative, but the movies also acknowledge that a world without religion isn’t great either. Instead of real religion, the academy seems to believe in a handful of imaginary religions created for the silver screen.” He cites the top two box-office draws last year – “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Avatar: The Way of Water” – and describes them as “fantasies that worship fictional military heroes and fictional religious warriors. Both were black-and-white good-guy-versus-bad-guy stories with little to no room for awareness of individual potential for evil.” Sounds like the whole Marvel Universe to me.

Holmes’ views were recently echoed by the popular actor and producer Rainn Wilson, who is known to have a thoughtful and spiritual side. In a March 11 tweet, he called out the post-apocalyptic fantasy TV series, “The Last of Us,” in which the protagonists are trying to survive in a brutal landscape filled with zombie-like mutants. In a recent episode, they encounter a compound led by a Bible-spouting figure, David, who turns out to be a cannibalistic pedophile. (I’m not making this up. Maybe the producers could have also given him horns and an evil laugh, just so we don’t miss the point.)

Wilson tweeted, “I do think there is an anti-Christian bias in Hollywood. As soon as the David character in ‘The Last of Us’ started reading from the Bible I knew that he was going to be a horrific villain. Could there be a Bible-reading preacher on a show who is actually loving and kind?”

Good question. My own view is that religion is as much fair game for examination or even satire as any other human activity. The problem comes when producers, directors and screenwriters don’t know a thing about the subject. When they rely on stereotypes, tropes or uninformed ideas about religion, we get a caricature like the David figure. My guess is that none of those responsible for that episode has ever set foot in a place of worship.

To be sure, there may be hostility to religion in some quarters of Hollywood, but I’m not sure its portrayal generally is the result of bias as much as it’s just lazy filmmaking. It’s the product of a lack of imagination and a reliance on vague notions of what film producers believe audiences want to see, and if it doesn’t remotely correspond to the actual experience of people who faithfully attend church, synagogue, mosque and temple – or the character of their religious leaders – well, so what?

Perhaps what we need in our popular entertainment is not uncritical, faith-based films, which are usually artless, but films that strive for honesty and truth about our collective, fumbling attempts find meaning in life through a search for God. Is that too much to ask?

Cary McMullen is a retired journalist and the former religion editor of The Ledger. He lives in Greensboro, NC.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Was there any faith at the Oscars?