Why "Avatar" Did Not Deserve Best Picture

The 82nd Academy Awards are in the can.  The only box scores that matter are those for James Cameron's Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker.  Avatar was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Achievement in Directing and Best Motion Picture of the Year, winning three for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Sound.  The Hurt Locker was also nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning Best Achievement in Sound Mixing; Best Achievement in Sound Editing; Best Achievement in Editing; Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen; Best Achievement in Directing, and Best Motion Picture of the Year.  This is as it should be.

A certain amount of grumbling has come from the geek gallery that Avatar should have won Best Picture.  For sure, Avatar is the greatest technical motion picture accomplishment to date, costing conservatively some $400 million-plus in production and promotion costs, and completely redefining not only what is thought of as "special effects" but the entire concept of how movies will be made in the future, thus setting a very high production bar.  Having said this, why did Avatar not deserve Best Picture?  Because, in the end, it was just a cartoon, with a cartoon plot.

Motion pictures are vehicles for all genre of art employed in their production.  Kiss of The Spider Woman (Island Alive, 1985) was a mediocre film that served as the vehicle for William Hurt's superb performance as Louis Molina, a homosexual pederast imprisoned for his proclivities.  Amadeus (Orion Pictures, 1984) was a brilliant revisionist history whose whole in performance out-weighted the sum of its parts.  The former won a Best Actor Academy Award for Hurt's grand performance and the latter won Best Picture (among others) for a compelling portrayal of period, character, and plot.  The difference between Avatar and The Hurt Locker is one of the quality of the story and how it was told.

In the case of Avatar, director Cameron, as Hollywood oft does, crammed every utopia-conflict-resolution feel-good cliche into his film, recreating the story of Pocahontas for his lack of plot rendering effort.  Like another Academy Award-nominated film, District 9 (Tristar, 2009), he beat the word viewer over the head with the fabled tolerance-anti-prejudice club until we were brain-damaged.  Like guitarists Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and their ilk, all of the technical ability in the world can't make up for the lack of a story.

Best Picture Oscar cannot be awarded for technological  achievement alone, particularly when that technical achievement is applied to comic book plot,  giving it, in effect, a technical  blow job that might wow the Adderall-addled collective unconscious of a generation but not a more measured opinion.

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Posted by liberationtheology at 3/10/2010 9:16 AM
Categories: Movie Reviews
Tags: James Cameron Academy Awards Kathryn Bigelow The Hurt Locker Avatar
 

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