Do you have to fuck to win an Oscar?

The big winners at last night's Oscars all have something going for them that my favorite, Philomena, didn't. Stories that touch the nation's conscience encased in lots of fucking, vulgarity, and violence. Twelve Years A Slave pricks the nation's lingering guilt over slavery and by extension, the unequal treatment black Americans still endure. The Dallas Buyers' Club pulls at our hearts over the way we mistreated and misunderstood AIDS victims and implicitly still mistreat and misunderstand gays and transsexuals today. Cate Blanchett was a natural to win, what with themes of Wall Street corruption (we're still feeling the effects more than five years after the meltdown) and a confused, sexy woman, always a popular Hollywood staple.

When an adoptee says: I'm not interested in searching....

Lorraine and daughter Jane, in NYC a few months after they first met

"Have you seen Philomena?" one friend after another has asked me. "What did you think?" 

Yes, I saw it and Yes, I liked it, wondering what they are actually asking. Like what is there not for me to "like" about Philomena? My brother asked about the nuns, others have asked about the slamming of the Church, and I tell them that yes, it was like that in Ireland and not much damn better in the U.S. I have a first mother friend who was told by a priest that she had to think of her daughter as "dead." (They are happily reunited today.)

Philomena: The Book

"These things did tale place" said Steve Coogan on The View. Coogan wrote the script for the Oscar-nominated film Philomena and played Martin Sixsmith the journalist who helped Philomena Lee find her son, Anthony, placed by Irish nuns for adoption in the United States in 1955.

Yes, these things did take place and they still do. The players are different: social workers and lawyers have replaced nuns as marketeers of children. Unwed mothers-to-be are no longer hidden away in convents but coerced through slick marketing campaigns to give their children away so they can have "a better life." Adoption records continue to be closed in most states. Children in foreign countries are still sold to Americans whose only qualification as parents is their ability to pay large fees. Records for these children are often non-existent or false. Unlike American adoptees who may find their birth families through the Internet and search angels, foreign-born children may never learn anything about their origins.

Philomena: A forced adoption, a lifetime quest, a longing that never waned

The book, the true story

Most of you already know the bare bones of the story of the film Philomena: Irish teen becomes pregnant, ends up in one of the horrid Magdalene laundries, her son is forcibly adopted when he is three by rich Americans, and a half century later his mother--Philomena Lee in real life--wants to find him and comes to Washington with a journalist who is writing her story, his newspaper paying the bills.

I made sure I had plenty of tissues with me but in fact, only needed one. True there is sadness aplenty, but served up with levity and even a few comedic moments to relax the tension. Judi Dench, as Philomena, gives a masterful, believable performance as she talks about what happened to her, seen in flashbacks, and in how she portrays the woman dealing with reality today. She says she wonders if her son ever thought about her, because she thought about him every single day. You got that right, I was thinking. Every adoptee who doesn't already know the answer to that should see this film.