Red carpet goes green

On Superbowl Oscar nite, pay attention to the Documentary Feature category. One of the five nominees is “The Garden” (director Scott Michael Kennedy) which follows the story of a community garden in South Central Los Angeles. The garden was established on 14-acres of city-owned landin the aftermath of the 1992 LA riots. It claims to be the largest community garden in the United States.* When the land was sold to a private developer in 2003, local citizens**, many of them Latino immigrants, rallied to protect the garden.

Wouldn’t it be great if this movie came to Rhode Island? Root for it on Oscar nite, tell your chums “in the Academy” to vote for it, and check out the movie website and gardeners’ website.

And, stay tuned for Green Zone the movie later in 2009. Synopsis: Matt Damon visits a certain Providence garden and eats some kale. Or in THEIR version, Matt Damon plays a warrant officer who helps a senior CIA officer searching for Weapons of Mass Destruction. 

*Don’t get me started on talking about all the acres of community gardens in Rhode Island during World War I. Maybe there wasn’t one single 14-acre plot (THOUGH MAYBE THERE WAS), but, for example, Brown & Sharpe oversaw 30 acres of gardens in Providence’s Smith Hill neighborhood in 1917. Let’s just say that this LA garden is very very large.

**plus Dennis Kucinich, Willie Nelson, and other celebs.