Glenn Garvin: The film cognoscenti blow off an inconvenient documentary

Commentary

I missed Sunday's Oscar telecast.

I was too busy watching the dead-solid lock for the award for Best Documentary Film Not Even Nominated: the horrifying, heartbreaking education movie "Waiting for 'Superman'."

At first glance, you might suppose that "Waiting for 'Superman'" is the kind of movie that Oscar voters would love, a poster child for Hollywood liberalism.

It follows the struggles of five kids -- four of them from hard-luck inner-city neighborhoods -- to get into decent schools.

What these children are trying to escape are schools where failure is literally a way of life. In one of the film's most chilling moments, "Waiting for 'Superman'" displays an animated map showing the locations of thousands of such "failure factories" across the United States, poisoning their neighborhoods like toxic waste dumps as they spit out broken kids.

"Waiting for 'Superman'" is a documentary, not a fairy tale, and the final scenes will make you cry. This is not what America is supposed to be about.

So why wasn't "Waiting for 'Superman'" nominated for an Oscar as best documentary?

The answer was plain during Sunday's ceremony, when several of the winners gave shout-outs to the belligerent public-employee unions laying siege to the capitol in Wisconsin. Hollywood is thoroughly unionized.

And "Waiting for 'Superman'" casts a hard eye on the role of teachers' unions in wrecking American schools.

It includes footage shot in New York City's notorious "rubber rooms," where hundreds of teachers accused of misconduct ranging from drunkenness on the job to sexual molestation of students lounge around playing cards or sleeping, on full salary, while union lawyers drag out their disciplinary hearings for years at a time.

It includes an interview with former Milwaukee school superintendent Howard Fuller, who was astonished to learn that he couldn't fire even a teacher who ducked a child's head in a dirty toilet bowl. It includes heinous statistics like this one: In a typical year in Illinois, one of every 57 doctors loses his medical license, one in every 97 lawyers is disbarred ... and just one in 2,500 teachers loses his license.

Right-wing union-busting?

Except Davis Guggenheim, who wrote and directed "Waiting for 'Superman'," is a left-wing Democrat who won an Oscar for the global-warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" and made the biographical video of Barack Obama screened at the 2008 Democratic convention.

"That was a difficult piece," he said of the teacher issue during a recent TV interview, "because I believe in unions -- I'm a member of the Director's Guild. ... That's a difficult thing to sort of dissect that issue."

Too difficult for Oscar voters.

Glenn Garvin writes for the Miami Herald.