Yay! Avatar DOESN’T Win Best Picture
08. Mar, 2010 
5 Comments
Icing on the cake? It doesn’t win best director either. Icing flowers on the cake? BOTH awards go to Cameron’s ex-wife for The Hurt Locker (a far, far, far superior film: Hurt Locker actually has WRITING behind it, originality behind it AND characters that weren’t cut out of animation cells for Disney’s Pocahontas.
Seems kinda strange to be rooting against a genre film, but I absolutely didn’t want to see the ripped-off makes-me-wanna-tear-my-eyeballs-outta-my-head-with-a-rusty-spoon drek that is Avatar obtain the crown of first SF film to win the Best Picture award.
Maybe Cameron will get the hint (but I doubt it).
Irony (not really) that it did win some technical awards. True irony? Star Trek gets the makeup award for forehead aliens! (About the only thing that itreally ought to have gotten an award for – yet another piece of re-tooled sci fi dreck. Avatar and ST reboot belong in the same no award box).
District 9 got dissed, yeah, too bad on that. So did Moon (big time) – but at least we won’t have to suffer the association of “SF” with Avatar as the ‘greatest sci fi flick of all time!” (thank fucking god for that one!!!)
How much ya wanna bet Harlan (if he paid attention last nite) got a nice little crooked smile across his face and muttered serves ya right pal?
From the even stranger department? What’s all this lamenting that an “SF” film has never won an Academy award?
Back in 1956, Around The World In 80 Days took best picture. Does anyone need a reminder that the movie (with David Niven) was based on the novel by JULES VERNE? and that the novel itself was just as much a speculative fiction of speculative technologies when written as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was?
The genre’s already broken the best picture cherry and for some reason we’re all trying to hide it like a not-so-blushing bride who doesn’t really deserve to be wearing a white dress at the wedding. (Apologies for the old-world sensibilities in that analogy, but it’s really apt: for some reason we’re treating a genre win like a father trying to get the best dowry price he can as he misrepresents the goods. Who’s got the lambs blood? Who’s got the sheets? Sorry buddy, the groom you’re trying to bamboozle is the very same one who stole the forbidden fruit – you’re not pulling the bridal sheets over his head. I guess the apologies were premature….)
Some of you may chime in with – what about LOTR’s win? – but really – that was a fantasy flick; if your genre definitions are as loose as our previously mentioned non-virginal bride’s morals are, it just might quality. Me – I’m pure as the driven snow (so long as a plow hasn’t been piling it up). LOTR qualifies as a “genre” win (of which there have been, ummm, two?) but not as an SF win, nor even a SciFi win.
So it goes. Good riddance to Avatar. You deserved better District 9, and so did you Moon.
Check out the list of nominees and winners below:
1937 Lost Horizon
1939 The Wizard of Oz
1950 King Solomon’s Mines
1956 Around The World In 80 Days WINNER
1964 Dr. Strangelove
1967 Dr. Doolittle
1971 A Clockwork Orange
1974 The Towering Inferno
1975 Jaws
1977 Star Wars
1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark
1982 E.T. The Extraterrestrial
1990 Ghost
1991 Beauty and the Beast
1999 The Sixth Sense
2001 The Lord of the Rings – Fellowship
2002 The Lord of the Rings – Two Towers
2003 The Lord of the Rings – Return – winner
2008 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2009 Avatar
2009 District 9
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I find I agree with you that the Avatar non-win was a good thing, though perhaps not for the same reasons. It was not an original film, but it was not a wretched film. From the standpoint of craftsmanship at least I would give the film high marks. In no way though should this have been a candidate for best picture, or even best cartoon-like depiction of an immature worldview. I saw it, do not feel that my life was particularly enriched, and have no plan to view it ever again.
A gentle reminder, Logan’s Run won an Academy Award in 1976. Any professional film association that can recognize merit in that film has surrendered any claim to be taken seriously ever again.
“Up” should also be listed as a Best Picture nominee in the fantasy genre.
The HURT LOCKER was boring. Make that booorrrriiing. * * Y a w n * *.
It amazes me that everyone (almost) jumped on the let’s hate Avatar” bandwagon early and often. It’s stolen, it’ not original, it’s over FX’d, the plot isn’t great, or original… whatever. Who cares???? The point everyone who decided Avatar is the movie you love to hate missed the point. The movie is fun, the effects are tremendous, the story works, whether it’s perfectly virgin or old hack, and it’s easily the best SF film since Star Wars V.
The same people who scream bloody murder about literary elitism against genre fiction do the same thing to this film. Hey, it’s a made up story, just like all the other movies, otherwise they’d be in the documentary category. Didn’t anyone notice Hurt Locker is about soldiers killing aliens, just like Avatar? Hurt Locker is the lowest grossing Best Picture in history. Avatar broke a Billion or whatever. people vote for their entertainment with their wallets. The Academy can be snooty and snobby and talk on and on about what’s meaningful for our times and all that malarky, but for those of us who like being ENTERTAINED by a movie, Avatar is the best of the bunch.
Richard,
I don’t perceive that my ‘jumping’ on this movie is anything other than what I’ve stated: I don’t measure the success or rightness of a film based on box office – most people who spend money are idiots (so I guess in that respect we could use it to measure film – the more it makes, the more it appeals to idiocy and ignorance).
My focus has always been Cameron’s DEMONSTRATED track record of stealing script materials. The Strugatsky brother’s Noon Universe series revelation was the nail in the coffin as far as I was concerned. I don’t think that someone who (ok – I believe) works on the principal that it is ok to steal and take credit for other’s work should be rewarded with trophies and dollars.
Even more so, I regret the damage that is done to the genre by the false presentation of films like Avatar as “good, successful, blockbuster” examples of what the genre is all about.
We end up with things like what just happened to the Wolfman re-do: clueless, effectless, lazy Twilight fans wrote in to the film makers accusing THEM of stealing themes and characters from Twilight! (Ummm – re-make idiot; from 1941 stupid. Go get some history edumacation – which means you have to put your trashy, crappy, ‘nother author getting millions for garbage books’ down and maybe learn a little something! Oh, so sorry – you won’t do that, it’s too hard to learn something when you can just baste in the treacly comfort of still-warm fecal matter)
All Cameron had to do was acknowledge the debt he owes to the genre (there are a lot of SF stories I love and this pastiche is my homage to some of those themes) and everything would be ok.
On the win – I suspect two things: either the Academy voters are aware of the charges leveled against him and gave them some degree of credence or, they actually thought that Hurt Locker was a better movie and better directed. (Of they just don’t want to give Cameron too swelled a head – Titanic was enough – and a pretty crappy film itself if you ask me).
I liked hurt locker – didn’t find it boring at all – intense in fact. Fully deserving of its awards. Now Bigelow will get offers of bigger dollars and we’ll see what she does with them. I’m betting that her next flick will outstrip the Avatar sequel (which I am also betting will be a flop since the novelty is over and there’s no writer or originality to back up the second one).