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Earlier in the evening, the industrious and iconoclastic film critic B. Ruby Rich, who, along with the multifaceted Peter Wollen, was one of the recipients of the SCMS Honored Lifetime Achievement Award, called on this same audience, “the academy that insists on context, the long view, [and] rigor of thought,” to expand their understanding of where their knowledge can go–to move beyond the safety of their campuses and journals in order to engage with the real world. The two committed women who shared the spotlight that evening provided living and inspirational examples of how to do so, and the entire evening was a reminder of the real purpose of learning: to share that knowledge with others.

On a similar note, the successive four days of screenings (of films from China, Niger, Palestine, Romania, and many other countries), committee meetings, and more than five hundred presentations provided evidence of SCMS’s continuing commitment to scholarly exchange. The two hundred plus panels covered everything from “The Culture of Torture” to “Four of a Kind: Analyses of TV Poker” and the sheer scope illustrated that the association has accomplished its goal of expanding the study of film and media beyond celluloid and Hollywood. Time and space in computer gaming, comics as contemporary art, and as expected, the latest sociological obsession–blogging–were just three of the tremendously varied topics.

An overwhelming number of panels and papers were devoted to the makeover and physical transformation in reality television, but perhaps this is only fitting given the inordinate programming featuring this same phenomena. One fascinating analysis, “Ticket to Ride: How Television Makeover Shows Make Good Looks a Prerequisite to Democratic Citizenship” by Brenda Weber, posited that these programs, with their emphasis on swearing allegiance to America’s normative ideals of gender-sex congruity (i.e., for women: whiter, blonder, thinner, bigger-breasted, sweetly passive, and always heterosexual) simulate a pledge of allegiance in which total physical assimilation (via plastic surgery) is now one of the mandatory prerequisites for full citizenship status.

It would be unfair to single out too many individual presentations, given that with fifteen panels occurring simultaneously it was impossible to hear even a small percentage, but I was impressed by an international panel on “The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry.” Succinct, razor-sharp research by Manjunath Pendakar regarding the truly seamless integration of both television and film majors and their monopolization of global markets made it difficult to believe that any of us living outside of an international capitol has a chance of viewing even a fifth of the outstanding independent and foreign productions being made today. After this expose, it did seem particularly ironic that the last session of the conference ended at the same time the major players in Los Angeles were strutting self-assuredly down the red carpet for the Oscar pre-shows. Despite the Vancouver conference and academia’s noble desire to heighten awareness of alternative voices and visions, “Hollywood South” seemed quite certain that their blockbusters will remain the conveyors of our dominant media images.