LCST2265

[Tracks C, M, S] This course takes Academy Award-winning films both past and present and interrogates how these films aestheticize and give coherent form to reactionary and problematic notions of race, class, queerness, ideologies of color-blindness, American empire, AI, and liberal bourgeois subjectivity. Read through the lens of key theoretical works in the fields of culture, media, and film studies (e.g., Althusser, Adorno, Hall, Harvey, Gates, Ngai, Butler, Mulvey, Said, Hartman), the course considers the aesthetic, political, and historical dimensions of the so-called "Oscar-bait" film. Films will include Crash, Brokeback Mountain, Slumdog Millionaire, Avatar, 12 Years A Slave, Her, Green Book, Three Billboards, Black Panther, Minari, and Nomadland. [Tracks C, M, S]