On the Monday after the Academy Awards presentation, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh made an extraordinary statement that the film “12 Years a Slave” would not have won the Academy’s “Best Picture” honor had it not had the “magic word” “slave” in the its title.
“If it was the only thing that movie won, it was gonna win best picture,” Limbaugh said. “There was no way. It didn’t matter if it was good or bad. I haven’t seen it. It was going to win. It had the magic word in the title: ‘slave.'”
Limbaugh was swiftly rebuked for that statement by some on the left. But on Friday night, left-leaning HBO “Real Time” host Bill Maher and his guest “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane argued Limbaugh wasn’t that far from the truth.
“[I] was at the Vanity Fair dinner tweeting about it the day before where he said this — and I was basically saying the same thing,” Maher said. “I said if you don’t have ‘slaves’ or AIDs in the title, you are just not going to win this year. What the liberals didn’t understand is that this is not a comment and I don’t like Rush Limbaugh. It’s not a comment on the validity of the movie. It’s a comment of the predictable how Hollywood liberals would conflate a cause with a performance.”
Later in the segment, MacFarlane said he tended to agree.
“Of all the things Rush has said that I don’t agree with — that’s not the most unreasonable,” MacFarlane added.
Follow Jeff on Twitter @jeff_poor
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