All evening I’ve felt very depressed like something was missing or was not quite right in my world. And as I drove home from bowling, it struck me. I watched United 93 this afternoon and I couldn’t shake the feeling of despair and death from the film. We went to Blockbuster earlier this week to see if any Oscar movies had been released and found three: Marie Antoinette, An Inconvenient Truth and United 93. I remember a shocked awe that came over the crowd when the nominees were announced last month and Paul Greenglass was nominated in for this film in the best director category. Not only were people shocked, but they are mostly certain that he has no chance at all. Nada. Not with Eastwood and Scorsese battling it out on the cinematic battleground.

Unless you live in a cave in Tibet, you know this film is about 9/11, and it’s the second film I’ve seen on this. I saw World Trade Center earlier this year and felt it was so so (Maybe if they left out celebrity casting like this gem does, it would’ve been better). Donna and I had recorded Flight 93 on television, and I actually still don’t know what the difference is between that and United 93. I do know that this one hit closest to home for me, literally. United 93 crashed in Somerset County less than 2 hours from my hometown. And we can postulate that it was a darn good thing it crashed since it was supposedly headed for D.C. Now I am not going to conspiracy theorize of anything with you, but how do we really know? Greenglass does a fine job of making a tasteful movie, but the only thing we know for sure that happened on that plane was what passengers said to people who they called before they all blew up and died. And Greenglass made his film around that.

I’ll admit. I cried. I sit here writing this, looking at the small TV where I watched the second plane crash into the WTC on CNN, and I watched my daughter play around me as I watched the movie earlier. She will never know a world without 9/11. She will never know the taken for granted freedoms we once had. It bugged me that Greenglass almost seemed to attempt to get into the psyche of the terrorists in the film, as if he knew what they were thinking. And how white everyone but the terrorists were in the film. The film bugged me. It bugged me that as with my grandparents before me who know where they were when Pearl Harbor was bombed or my parents who know where they were when Kennedy was shot, and now I won’t forget where I was in Sept 11, 2001. I was in my bedroom in our first apartment getting ready for work watching on a small Emerson CRT television. And I sit here writing this, I wonder where my daughter will be when the next big catastrophe happens.

Greenglass has a snowballs chance in hell for the directing nod, but maybe if the Academy wants to throw the auteur a bone it’ll come in the shape of a film editing Oscar, even though there are some heavy hitters there, as well. We will see if the five year old largest catastrophe on American soil, and the third film about it, can come away with a solitaire award on Oscar night.