#136

Avatar DIDN’T win the Oscar for Best Picture.

Because of a self-imposed boycott of the 82nd Annual Academy Awards,  I didn’t watch tonight’s ceremony, but I was online when the news broke that The Hurt Locker swept Best Director and Best Picture, leaving the polarizing Avatar in the dust.

My faith in the film industry has now been restored… a little bit, anyway.

The people who have seen Avatar fall into one of two opposing teams. Team Avatar insists the film was the best thing to ever happen to cinema and will defend their masterpiece and Director James Cameron to the death, while Team Dances With Smurfs acknowledges that the visual effects are stunning but the story is nothing more than cliched, poorly written tripe, undeserving of a $500 million budget and a $2.5 billion worldwide gross.

I haven’t seen The Hurt Locker yet so I can’t say whether or not I think the film deserved to win.  Of the 10 nominees, I’ve seen four: Avatar, District 9, Up, and Up in the Air, and of those films, Up in the Air would have been my pick for Best Picture.  The first fifteen minutes of Up were brilliant, but the last hour fell short of Pixar’s earlier Oscar-winning films Wall-E and The Incredibles.

I am curious to see if the Avatar controversy and the Academy’s gimmicky nomination of ten films for Best Picture were enough to entice millions of new viewers to the 3+ hours of awkward, unfunny presenters and pompous ceremony.  From the hundreds of angry rants on the Avatar and Hurt Locker IMDB message boards, one would think that an entire nation had tuned in for the battle between the blue smurfs and the bomb squad.  Well, everyone but me.

Of course the night’s real winner is director Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman in 82 years of Academy history to walk away with the Oscar for Best Director.  In the years to come, may the award always go to the most deserving auteur, regardless of gender.