Soccer rioting in Egypt another example of sick, mob mentality

• Reprints

Updated: March 3, 2012 11:41AM

Virtually every time an American or Canadian team wins a professional sports championship, the celebration is tempered by the inevitable stories about a small percentage of idiots who use the victory as an excuse to set fires, loot stores and occasionally beat each other silly.

The media often refer to these outbreaks of stupidity as “rioting.”

We read the stories and see the footage of so-called fans tipping over cabs and smashing windows and punching each other in Vancouver or Detroit or New York and we shake our heads. What does the world think of us?

Not that most other spots in the world have room to talk.

Have you seen the footage of the insanity in Cairo, where soccer fanatics stormed the field after the local underdogs scored an upset over Egypt’s top club?

As of this writing, some 74 people are dead and more than 1,000 injured in the deadliest soccer violence in 15 years.

All because one team kicked the ball past the goalie three times, while the favored team kicked the ball past the goalie just once.

Criticizing the alleged inaction by police, one player said, “People here are dying and no one is doing a thing. It’s like a war? Is life this cheap?”

Sadly, in the frenzied, sick, group-mob “mentality” of some, the answer would be yes.

Living in the past

My Sun-Times friend Bill Zwecker was moderating an Oscar discussion with myself and the Trib’s Michael Phillips when the talk turned to the seemingly inordinate percentage of nominated performances from 2011 films set in the past.

In some cases, it’s a dramatized version of a real-life figure. Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher, Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe, Brad Pitt as Billy Beane circa 10 years ago.

In other instances, it’s historical fiction, from Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer in “The Help” to Jean Dujardin in “The Artist” to Brad Pitt in “Tree of Life.” (To name just some examples.)

Thanks to a voting process that makes the Iowa caucuses look efficient, there are nine Best Picture nominees this year. Only one, “The Descendants” is set in present day. Even “modern” films such as “Moneyball” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” focus on events of a decade ago.

At first blush that might seem unusual, but it stands to reason that so many Oscar-nominated movies are from a different era. With a whole wide history of the world to draw upon, filmmakers often delve into the past for material — especially for the more serious fare likely to gain the Academy’s attention.

Your action film or your romantic comedy, your gross-out hard-R romp or your big-budget thriller? Probably going to be set in the here and now, if not the future. But the nominated films and performances are almost always dominated by characters and films from days gone by.

In 2005, for example, the modern fable “Crash” won for Best Picture (instantly becoming one of the most unpopular winners of all time), but the other nominees were “Capote,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “Munich” and “Brokeback Mountain” — all set decades earlier.

Last year, the Best Picture battle boiled down to two contenders, each telling a stylized version of real-life events: the 21st century Facebook story “The Social Network” vs. the very old-school “The King’s Speech,” with the latter prevailing.

But even “The Social Network” was a look back. The opening scenes take place way back in 2003.