{"id":8292,"date":"2015-02-22T15:02:46","date_gmt":"2015-02-22T15:02:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=8292"},"modified":"2015-02-22T15:02:46","modified_gmt":"2015-02-22T15:02:46","slug":"heres-a-vote-for-bradley-cooper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=8292","title":{"rendered":"Here&#039;s a vote for Bradley Cooper"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"twitter-share\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?via=jkanelis\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n<p>Five men are competing for an acting award tonight that is going to draw more than the usual amount of attention.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve got my favorite and I&#8217;ll declare right here: I want Bradley Cooper to win the Oscar for Best Actor.<\/p>\n<p>Am I an expert on films? Hardly. Do I know enough about acting techniques to make an educated assessment of who <em>should<\/em> win? Not even close.<\/p>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t even seen all the performances. But I&#8217;ve seen &#8220;American Sniper,&#8221; the film that stars Cooper as the late Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL sniper credited with 160 &#8220;kills&#8221; while serving four tours in Iraq.<\/p>\n<p>OK, so my wish for Cooper to win the Oscar isn&#8217;t even as educated as it should be. But I have heard the debate about the film and have come to my own conclusion about it: To my way of thinking, &#8220;American Sniper&#8221; does <em>not<\/em> glorify war; it does <em>not<\/em> endorse a war policy, nor does it condemn it. The film tells a gripping story about a young man who signed up to fight for his country, did his duty and struggled with the terrible &#8212; but lawful &#8212; orders he was required to carry out.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;American Sniper&#8221; is an important film that has drawn considerable comment from those on the left and the right.<\/p>\n<p>This weekend, I had a conversation with a retired Amarillo police officer who&#8217;s also seen the film. He was highly critical of the &#8220;far left wackos&#8221; who&#8217;ve criticized the movie. My friend tilts to the right; I tilt to the left, although I don&#8217;t consider myself to be a far left wacko. I tried to calm my friend down a bit by reminding him that the wackos to whom he refers don&#8217;t necessarily represent mainstream progressive thinkers.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, I&#8217;ve been critical of some of those critics &#8212; such as filmmaker Michael Moore, who labeled snipers as &#8220;cowards.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>My former cop friend thinks the left-leaning motion picture academy will be highly reluctant to support Cooper for Best Actor Oscar because of the content of the film.<\/p>\n<p>I remain cautiously optimistic that my friend has it wrong.<\/p>\n<p>Would I think differently if I had seen all the actors&#8217; performances under consideration? That&#8217;s a hypothetical question, so I cannot answer it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll just stand by my hope that Bradley Cooper tonight wins the Oscar.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"twitter-share\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?via=jkanelis\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Five men are competing for an acting award tonight that is going to draw more than the usual amount of attention. I&#8217;ve got my favorite and I&#8217;ll declare right here: I want Bradley Cooper to win the Oscar for Best Actor. Am I an expert on films? Hardly. Do I know enough about acting techniques &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=8292\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Here&#039;s a vote for Bradley Cooper<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[135,325,369,729,968,3029,3226,3459],"class_list":["post-8292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment-news","tag-academy-awards","tag-amarillo-police-department","tag-american-sniper","tag-bradley-cooper","tag-chris-kyle","tag-michael-moore","tag-navy-seals","tag-oscar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}