Did Gore deserve Oscar for "scare-you-mental"?

• Position: Al Gore - Brief article

Former Vice Pres. Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" was one of five films nominated for an Academy Award in the "Best Documentary Feature" category. Given Hollywood's enthusiasm for environmental activism, Gore's stature as a political icon, and the film's success at the box office (the third top grossing documentary ever), it would have been astonishing if "An Inconvenient Truth" did not win an Oscar. Actually, it garnered two as Melissa Etheridge's new anti-global-warming anthem, "I Need To Wake Up," part of the film's soundtrack, captured the Academy Award for Best Original Song for a Motion Picture.

"There's just one small problem," maintains Marie Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C. "Gore's film isn't really a documentary; it's a 'Scare-You-Mentary.'" As Lewis points out, nearly every statement the former Vice President makes in "AIT" about climate science and policy either is one-sided, misleading, exaggerated, speculative, or just plain wrong.

"Gore's warning that sea levels might rise 20 feet in our...