What Happened to Avatar?

Written March 15, 2010

          Sometimes the right thing happens so naturally that no one takes much notice of it.  Which is exactly what happened when Avatar missed out on all the top honors at the recent Academy Awards, Hollywood’s annual pageant of back-slapping self-congratulation.

           The movie has already broken all domestic and international box office records with a “grand total” (after a mere three months of 3-D circulation) of more than 2.6 billion dollars, according to the IMDb, the International Movie Database.  And director/writer James Cameron has as a result received early pre-canonization that many believe will lead at the earliest possible moment to his becoming Saint James of Tinsel Town.

           It has been a giddy ride for Cameron, one that many could see coming as the result of his previous work, which includes such impressive blockbusters as Titanic (1997), $1.8 billion worldwide, and the four-movie Terminator franchise, $1.4 billion.  This is a man who has figured out how to make a buck making movies.

           So going into Oscar night on March 7, no one would have been surprised by a clean sweep for the gold-plated Avatar, which, instead, went down in spectacular, computer-generated flames.  The two great prizes of the evening went to The Hurt Locker, which captured Best Picture and Best Director honors, the latter going to Kathryn Bigelow, who managed to shoot it for the bargain price of $15 million, compared to the estimated $300 to $500 million it took to shoot Avatar.

           And it was nothing if not sweet justice to give the Best Director award to a woman for the first time in history—a woman who just happened to be the ex-wife of Saint James himself.

           It’s tempting to think Hollywood voters were rewarding small, independent film makers, like Bigelow, encouraging them to continue following their dreams by working on small gems of cinematic perfection.  And The Hurt Locker is certainly a good movie, a valuable addition to the growing list of fine independent films that come out more and more often from the American film industry.

           But the problem is that it isn’t so good as to have unceremoniously dumped Avatar from its pre-Oscar sanctification.  No, Avatar had to contribute to its own demise for The Hurt Locker to overtake it on Oscar night.

           Which it did.  Oscar voters apparently viewed with raised eyebrows this expensive and hugely profitable film as it drifted oddly into a nearly three-hour denunciation of American capitalism.  Even Hollywood types, it would seem, have a limit to the hypocrisy they will tolerate.

           It may not be too much to hope that voters also saw the silliness of setting this “futuristic” movie in the year 2154 on a distant planet, and then populating it with giant blue people who nonetheless look a lot like Native Americans from the 1800s.  They wear loin cloths, shoot bows and arrows, and worship nature.  Is this science fiction—or an American Indian romance?  Avatar wants to be both but in the end it merely looks lost in its own interplanetary wilderness.

           And just maybe the Hollywood types who voted against Avatar this year got a little weary of their industry’s tiresome, self-righteous, moral outrage, which it wears like a merit badge on all public occasions.  There isn’t anything wrong of course with a movie like Avatar being for conservation, equal rights, and peace; nor is there anything wrong with challenging aspects of American culture that need challenging.  But Avatar may have struck Oscar voters as insincere, nothing more than a vehicle for spray-shooting clichés that, with neat accompanying 3-D visuals, give the movie a veneer of high morality with a money-grubbing American capitalism at its bleeding heart.

           Oscar voters did the right thing.  In the words of a famous song, “Hooray for Hollywood!”