Best Picture Jumps From 5 to 10 Nominees in 2010: My Oscar Grouch and a James Cameron Rant
We’re a short time away from the Oscar announcements the first week of February and it’s time to take stock of the sideshow that is the Academy Awards. Like last year, we’ll be posting a 2009 wrap up of notable films (I don’t do “10 Best Lists” or anything, see our 2008 Notable Film Awards). Expect my “notable” list in the next few days–I have one 2009 release that’s waiting for a viewing that I would be remiss to not consider before posting my rather irrelevant thoughts.
In any case, most of you that care are already probably aware of the surprising decision from the Academy to expand the list of nominees in the Best Picture category from five to ten in the Oscar race. Is this really a good thing?
Even though this harkens back to Oscar’s early days, I’m not sure that this bodes well for the awards. Part of the fun of picking apart the Best Picture nominees is the debate of what should and shouldn’t have made the list. For me, the nominees are the only thing worthy of note. The award winners themselves are almost always a mix of politics, opinion and such a variety of other factors that it’s all for the sake of discussion as opposed to any real judgment of what was “best” anything. And that’s okay. I still love the Oscars for that reason, the discussion it generates.
My beef last year was that The Dark Knight deserved to be on the final list of 5 nominated for Best Picture. While I saw all but one of the films nominated, I feel it was definitely of similar or better quality than what made the list. The expansion of the field this year to ten is a misguided response by the Academy to the common complaint of politics and favoritism and the ongoing criticism that certain genres seem to always get shafted ala The Dark Knight snub last year.
Unfortunately that means there are probably going to be some token best picture nominations that are undeserved. One film in particular that has no business being nominated is almost certainly going to get an underserved nod this year: Avatar. Now I liked Avatar. It was a technical masterpiece, but in my opinion, a technical masterpiece is not enough. My review from a last month pretty much nails my feeling on the script. Structurally fine, but derivative in the most negative sense of the word. Beyond the technical work, there was nothing original about the film and the character work was poor. This in itself should really take it out of contention even if you expand the list to 10.
Now I love Cameron’s work generally, but I’m not sure he’s put anything out there besides Titanic that should have been considered for best picture. He has three films that I think are exceptional, four if you count Titanic, which I don’t. However, if I’m ranking Cameron directed films, I think Avatar barely notches into the top five, and that’s for a director with barely over a dozen theatrical credits. Laugh me off the internet if you must, but if you want the complete package of script, character and technical brilliance, Avatar is a pale 3rd behind Terminator 2 and Aliens. Even True Lies is simply one of the great movie joys of the last 20 years. Avatar just plain looked great. While I may not view Titanic as “Best Picture” the year it won, I still think it notches Avatar at the very least in terms of originality.
My irritation with the Avatar thing really only grinds my gears this much because of an interview I saw with him this week. I have no problem with people “loving” the film, as was the case with Oprah Winfrey when she had Cameron on her show. During the course of the interview, though, there were two things that stuck with me. The first was Oprah admitting to Cameron that this is the first film that she’d actually seen in a theater in many years, the last being Dances With Wolves. I find that unintentionally hilarious. If you read my Avatar review, you may remember that my feeling was that the film was a direct remake of Dances With Wolves (or as was pointed out on failblog.com last week, Disney’s Pocahontas). But I had to chuckle that Oprah didn’t happen to notice that the last two films she saw in the theater happen to use the same script with a few character names and locations changed—slight exaggeration intended on my part.
My second irritation, in an unfunny way this time, was Oprah dishing the praise on him about how all this could have come from his imagination, reinforcing that Avatar was 100% his from top to bottom. I absolutely expected him to at least acknowledge that the story in the strictest sense had been told before—I didn’t even expect him to admit that it had been told better, but to sit there and just basically smile and nod to Oprah in silent acknowledgment that this story was his and his alone. That bugged me. Damn, I’m a bitter old movie addict.
Alright, I’m done ranting about Cameron. And I have to again acknowledge that the man has brought a lot of great films into my life over the years.
Well, maybe I’m just bitter because I was so damned sure that this year I would have seen all the nominees for Best Picture going in. You’d think that someone who put 40 films on the tick chart for the year would have a good shot, but probably not now. However, that’s not a big deal, I just hope that that there aren’t any “token” nominations in the list. That’s not going to be the case though. The reason for this expansion is certainly for the purpose of generating more interest in the awards by throwing films like Avatar into the mix, as opposed to trying to drum up box office for a field of films that had limited release and appeal. In other words, rather than having a Best Picture boosting a film that probably would have been a critical success without breaking the bank like last year’s Slumdog (great but a tad overrated), they want to have box office breakers drum up ratings for an overly long and often mediocre broadcast.
Place your bets now. I’ll sit still for an Avatar nomination, but if Transformers 2 or GI Joe end up on that list, I’ll be writing my local congressman and CCing Roger Ebert. I’ll be a real Oscar grouch.
Technorati 
Del.icio.us 
StumbleUpon 
Digg 
Facebook 
Mixx 
Reddit
Tags: James Cameron, Movies
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
2 Responses to “Best Picture Jumps From 5 to 10 Nominees in 2010: My Oscar Grouch and a James Cameron Rant”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
January 19th, 2010 at 1:23 am
Personally, I’d be more miffed that he didn’t acknowledge the artists, designers, and computer techs who actually came up with all the plants and animals of the world. You know Cameron just said something to the effect of “And they need horses or something,” and twenty designers produced five-hundred sketches for him to consider and comment on. He didn’t walk in with a full sketchbook of every piece of Pandora life and geography on day one.
January 19th, 2010 at 7:46 pm
“Okay, gimme some tall thin Smurfs…”