Over the weekend, multiple Academy members told TheWrap that they had been passing around a recent article by Dennis Jett in The New Republic that attacks the film for making a hero out of Kyle. "I have not seen American Sniper," he wrote. "But if the trailer is any indication, Eastwood's film, like 'Zero Dark Thirty,' tries to make a straightforward situation more complex than it is."The film's straightforward treatment of Kyle, who was killed in February 2013 by a veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, is one of the reasons it has been celebrated by the military and embraced by audiences that have made it by far the top-grossing Best Picture nominee.
"He seems like he may be a sociopath," one Academy member told TheWrap, adding he had not yet seen the film but had read the article, which is being passed around.
A piece in The Guardian by author Lindy West criticized Kyle this way: "The real American Sniper was a hate-filled killer. Why are simplistic patriots treating him as a hero?" he wrote.
In the Guardian piece, West wrote of the film, "If [Eastwood], intentionally or not, makes a hero out of Kyle – who, bare minimum, was a racist who took pleasure in dehumanizing and killing brown people – is he responsible for validating racism, murder, and dehumanization?" [emphasis added]
Omitted the Michael Moore comment seen elsewhere here, q.v