Man of Mettle.What a long, strange trip this honorary Oscar took when Jane Fonda handed it to Polish director Andrzej Wajda at this year's Academy Awards. Fonda was the highest-profile "revolutionary" of her generation before embarking on a series of identity shape-shifts that have included Fitness Queen, Trophy Wife, and now Born Again Christian. Wajda spent his life revealing revolution's moral fraudulence. Only Hollywood, in honoring him, could then have committed the kitsch kitsch [Ger.,=trash], term most frequently applied since the early 20th cent. to works considered pretentious and tasteless. Exploitative commercial objects such as Mona Lisa scarves and abominable plaster reproductions of sculptural masterpieces are described as kitsch, as are works that claim artistic value but are weak, cheap, or sentimental. A museum of kitsch was opened in Stuttgart. of pairing him with Fonda. "If you understood what communism was," Fonda reportedly told a Black Panthers Black Panthers, U.S. African-American militant party, founded (1966) in Oakland, Calif., by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Originally espousing violent revolution as the only means of achieving black liberation, the Black Panthers called on African Americans to arm themselves for the liberation struggle. fundraiser back in 1969, "you would pray on your knees that we would someday become communists." Wajda knew. His films chronicle the duplicity of the Soviet "liberators" who halted at the Vistula Vistula (vĭs`ch  lə), Pol. Wisła, longest river and principal waterway of Poland, c.665 mi (1,070 km) long. while resistance fighters were slaughtered in Warsaw (Kanal, 1957), the oppression of Polish workers (Man of Marble, 1977), and the rise of the Solidarity movement (Man of Iron, 1981), among much else. Fonda offered some boilerplate Boilerplate The standardization of a legal document's structure and language. This leads to quicker and more efficient practices in terms of the filling out and processing of documents.Most often used in contracts, prospectuses and indentures. Notes: An example would be a bank having a standard contract for everyone who applies for a home loan. about Wajda's courage, but said nothing of its context aside from a useless reference to "state censorship." Wajda provided his own context. "I thank the American friends of Poland," he said, "for helping my country rejoin Western civilization."
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