On the Monday night following the long Thanksgiving weekend, New York City’s independent film community gathered in Lower Manhattan for the Gotham Awards, an annual fundraising event for the ever-vital Independent Feature Project [Full disclosure, I serve on the nominating committee for the Gotham Awards’ Documentary Film category]. The ceremony put the Gothams first on the awards calendar, a somewhat controversial move that saw them slide ahead of The New York Film Critics Circle (who announced their award winners the next day) and The National Board of Review, an organization whose awards have traditionally kicked off the season.

If there were hostile whispers about the move, it didn’t seem to matter on the night; the celebrities were luminous and out in force, with Charlize Theron, Alec Baldwin, Gary Oldman, Tilda Swinton, Stanley Tucci and Christopher Plummer providing the paparazzi the famous faces upon which to train their lenses. The ceremony itself was brisk and full of surprises, with winners in categories like Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You (Scenes of a Crime), Breakthrough Actor (Felicity Jones) and Best Ensemble Performance (Beginners) signaling just how unique the event really is.

The Gothams did a lovely job of balancing glitz and mission, celebrating established names with the same sincerity with which they announced the arrival of new voices. Film award season has a lot in common with political campaigning; teams of handlers and publicists racing to get their contenders out in front of the masses, industry power players serving as a sort of electoral college, their votes courted in private screening rooms, lavish luncheons and exclusive cocktail parties.

Awarding organizations can also function in a familiar way, moving their events up and down the calendar like states jockeying for primacy in a mad scramble to be first, to set the agenda for the season and expand influence among the big names in the business. And of course, the goal is to win, because winning means money, prestige and power.

To the casual observer, awards for films may seem not only superficial but a wholly subjective waste of time, free of reasonable criteria (what defines the best actor in a given year?) and generally bucking popular taste in favor of critical acclaim (the disparity between box office popularity and award accumulation is usually vast).

As cultural access grows more and more democratic, anyone with an opinion and a computer is able to broadcast their thoughts and enter the conversation, yet most organizations awarding films have built an exclusive firewall around the process, maintaining a secret ballot for select groups of voters, maintaining the power to fascinate and frustrate the masses. It seems odd that perhaps the most democratic and populist of art forms still celebrates itself with the glamour and gusto of a segregated aristocracy.

But how else to maintain the illusory power of the cinema? Celebrity gossip dominates the narrative as movie stars and their teams struggle to maintain control of their images, and with the rise of social media, audiences are given access to the lives of celebrities who broadcast their daily experiences in real time. It’s growing harder and harder to suspend disbelief, to remove the business of film and publicity from the pleasure of the work itself.

In this context, award season feels almost decadent, a chance to bask in the old-school autobiography that the movie business continues to write. If anything, this is the season for re-establishing Hollywood’s self-image, one that continues to move further and further from the emerging power we have as movie lovers, harkening back to a simpler time when movies dominated our dreams and everything was under control.

In 2002, the New York Film Critics Circle came close to naming Jackass the year’s Best Non-Fiction Film until more traditional-minded members (after some audible grumbling) pushed the vote to the since-forgotten Standing in the Shadows of Motown. (Some might call that a cop-out.) Now, Jackass 3D continues the prankster series that began on MTV and, at last, has picked up a kind of honor: Jackass 3D held its premiere at the Museum of Modern Art.

A scene from Jackass 3D.

Clearly, notions of respectability have changed since ’02, but so has the mainstream’s understanding of the Jackass phenomenon’s significance. Curator Josh Siegel put Jackass 3D in the same tradition being celebrated in MoMA’s series “More Cruel and Unusual Comedy: Social Commentary in the American Slapstick Film,” which showcases movies from the silent era that dared to crack the funny bone before tickling the mind. The Jackass crew—Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Chris Pontius, Wee Man and Steve O—perform Three Stooges-style slapstick with mischievous disregard for propriety and safety. Turning their bodies into pincushions, punching bags, toilets and vomit projectors, they publicize redneck recklessness as a form of foolish All-American freedom.

Jackass stunts are clearly stuff parents wouldn’t sanction their rowdiest sons to do—with the exception of Bam Margera’s parents (ursine Phil and grinning April), who are eager, if often surprised, participants in the set-ups. They provide an adult-to-kid context that proves risk and folly are not limited to youth. It may have something to do with the American sensibility for individual fearlessness and license. Jackass 3D upgrades the silliness by incorporating the latest—hallowed—Hollywood technology. And be grateful for that: Seeing feces and dildos poke-out at your customized goggles puts all James Cameron’s high-falutin’ pronouncements about “immersion” in correct perspective: It’s not only a filmmaking gimmick, it’s also a marketing gimmick.

Through such candor, Jackass 3D isn’t exactly subversive: How can it be when it doesn’t take itself seriously? It is, thankfully, irreverent of all pomposity. Siegel cites the tradition of slapstick as social commentary, but that’s only accidentally true of Jackass 3D. Having derived from the venal, shameless laboratory of MTV’s mad scientists who are devoted to exploiting teens and young adults by luring them into hedonism, narcissism, alcoholism and shopping, there’s no room for commentary—just consumerist anarchy by example. Despite a disclaimer that warns against imitating the Jackass stunts, most of the acrobatics and hazing routines cost money (and standby EMS) to perform. The promptings of drugs and idiocy notwithstanding, these kamikaze acts tell less about the mental state of these irresponsible boy-men than about our youth culture’s open sleaziness.

Cultural critic Richard Torres’ 2002 assessment of the first Jackass movie—“It’s not homoerotic, it’s just homo”—wittily cut to the masculinist basis of these Iron John/Burning Man rituals run amok. Credit one of the series’ producers (and sometime participant), Spike Jonze, with the knack for turning such polymorphous perversity into something akin to surrealism. But keep in mind an important difference: the Surrealists weren’t paid by Sumner Redstone. Back then “Shock the Bourgeoisie” was not an expected part of the entertainment marketing. The only surreal element of the Jackass films is the thin line between performance and humiliation. The line between silly and psychotic wavers. Knoxville and crew absorb all definitions of gender as well as gender-fuck (although this time I missed Pontius’ bouncy, glitter-thonged Party Boy shtick), and they come out free.

The Jackasses laugh at their own virility and fearlessness. This allows them to ring clownish variations on classic examples of social critique: One routine has a Jackass hold an apple between his buttocks as a pig snorts it out and returns for more—mocking the horrific moment of unmanning in Deliverance. But most often Jackass 3D offers outrageous changes on comic form: A bar fight among dwarfs is the most conventional, containing a complete, unified scenario. Steve O’s Super Cocktail Bungee routine in a feces-filled port-a-john utilizes distance and trajectory in a way that recalls the great waterslide joke in Norbit (and should help rehabilitate that wonderful film’s unfair reputation). Bam’s fear of snakes gets aroused with Indiana Jones-style torment. There’s even perfect dramatic/comic balance in the recurring meta-motif of a cameraman constantly repulsed by the odorous antics. Revulsion or jittery trepidation is what acknowledges the existence of standard perimeters or at least the audience’s own squeamishness.

Jackass 3D can also be considered an inkblot that tests popular perception of what is tasteful and, of course, what is male. Director Jeff Tremaine’s final 3D trick is a celebration with in-your-face explosions, wreckage and confetti. It imitates the destruction of bourgeois materialism at the end of Zabriskie Point, then becomes an end-credits montage singling out each of the Jackasses alongside their nostalgic schoolboy photos. An accompanying Weezer tune, “Memories,” describes a longing for innocent carelessness. It’s an indulgence, but to understand it is to understand why the terrorists hate us and why Jackass 3D is also a political documentary.

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