Best Picture?
That'd be like giving Obama the Nobel Pea..... ah, as you were...
James Cameron's sci-fi epic Avatar has been nominated for nine Oscars, and will battle for the best film title with nine other titles, including the The Hurt Locker, directed by the Titanic helmsman's former wife Kathryn Bigelow, and itself up for nine statuettes. The list of potential best movie laureates has been expanded …
there's a whole TON of films this can be easily applied to if you choose the right stuff. not only is it because it's something of a universal truth anyway (there are only 7 or 8 core "stories" in the world, goes the narriative adage, and the devil is in how you put icing on top of their cake), but also because Avatar seems both stylistically and narriatively to be a tasty stew of about 40 years worth of epic sci fi and fantasy films... Cameron having - perhaps subconciously - picked and chosen various neat touches or threads from here and there to throw into his movie. Only somewhere he forgot to stir and add a pinch of salt. But never mind... it's still great eye candy if not very filling.
Most obviously we have analogues of Alien and Titanic, but also pretty much the entire studio Ghibli back catalogue and a ton of others.
(on that note, once we're done going off on a tangent to compare Disneys Atlantis with the earlier Nadia Secret of Blue Water for balance, I'd like to see if much of Pocahontas or Avatar is visible in Princess Mononoke... been quite a while since I've seen either of them)
I'd happily agree it could win for visual effects, art direction and possibily for cinematography. The remainder? You're avin a larf, aintcha?
As a 3D spectacle it's magnificent, but as an action film entirely predictable and extremely average. The music was so forgettable I can barely remember it. Last of the Mohicans will be remembered for many years beyond Avatar if there's any justice in the world.
Action films aren't exactly known for wonderful plots, although Avatar barely manages to reach even that standard.
The real pity is that JC has written and directed Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator and (to a slightly lesser extent) Terminator 2, all of which were decent films. Some people are unkind enough to say that he's caught the George Lucas disease, but his standard of output is far in excess of George's.
You see a bit of Michelle Rodriguez's though. Kinda.
The screenplay is lousy, but it's just about forgivable given how extraordinary the rest of it is. I hope Bigelow gets her due, though, and I don't think Avatar really deserves to totally clean up, although it probably will.
I guess it's an advantage to having young kids, not having to be completely dissapointed by invariably over hyped rubbish, not that it necessarily is of course.
I don't get to go to the cinema any more you see, and I don't have time to trawl for torrents (more time looking for content than using the content)
I'll wait for the DVD/Bluray or sky box office release and THEN I'll be disappointed, but by then the hype will have died down and I wont be as disappointed.
I liked Avatar, very entertaining and it did not feel like the 2:30h it actually was. To me.
But I believe Original Score (was there music in it, really?), Best Picture, and Director should not have been included in the nominations. Unless direction of mostly CGI counts, which it might. To be a "Best Picture", I'd say it has to be well balanced -- and for that, it would need to have a plot that is at least decent, which Avatar did not have. Simplistic, maniquean, heavy on Rousseau's noble savage BS, and exaggerates on the tree hugging references every 5 minutes.
We should appreciate the oscars. They let us know what not to watch. I mean, the more oscars, the less value. That's how it seems to have been for a while now. And no, Avatar most certainly does not require the oscars :D the movie's done so well allready that i think JC can smile all the way to the bank you know? But yeah, District 9 and Moon are the scifi flicks that deserve the oscars (if it were a price worth having, but after checking, Phantom Menace received no oscars, only 3 nominations. There is hope?). Not Camerons treehugging suicide inducing diatribe about the greed of the white man. And when it comes to the soundtrack, i thought he had just taken it out of Aliens. Besides, who needs oscars when you have a mountain in China, HALLELUJAH!