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Movies
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| The making of Avatar | Jay Stone
Movie Entertainment
March 2010
The Oscars are coming up, and just in time too. The sense of national outrage that inevitably accompanies the Olympic Games will soon be behind us, and fans of ice dancing will need something else to be flabbergasted about. Personally, if Avatar beats The Hurt Locker for the Best Picture award, I’m going to blame the Russian judges.
The Oscars seem to have much the same sense of personal investment as the Olympics. The feeling of patriotism is missing, but people always root for the movies they decide to see. If you decide, for instance, that the Coen Brothers movie A Serious Man sounds a little too bizarre for your taste – you’re a big The Blind Side fan, say – and then A Serious Man wins the Oscar, you feel like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is saying something unpleasant about your taste. Well, to hell with them.
Unlike the Olympics, no one has ever asked for a sex test after an Academy Award victory – although they must have been close when Linda Hunt won the Oscar for playing a man in The Year of Living Dangerously – but there are a lot of gender issues in this year’s Academy Awards race as well. The Battle of the Exes, they’re calling it: Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron, who were briefly married, are competing for the Best Director and Best Picture Oscars, along with several others. Bigelow would be the first woman to win the Best Director award, and Cameron would be the first king of the world to be inaugurated king of the universe as well.
The people who like to stereotype directors by sex must be surprised by the reversals in this race. The Hurt Locker, Bigelow’s movie, is a gritty little war drama, a muscular, on-the-ground thriller about soldiers who get blown up trying to defuse bombs. Avatar, Cameron’s entry, is a New Age meditation on nature and our connections to the very soil that nourishes us. It looks like the kind of thing that would be perfect if the yoga class wanted to plan a movie night. It turns out that men and women aren’t so different after all, although you may not want to try that one out at the Olympic Gender Verification centre.
I don’t have any dogs in the Oscar fight. I liked Colin Firth’s performance in A Single Man, but he’ll never beat Jeff Bridges. Likewise, Sandra Bullock probably will be named Best Actress because this is her year: it’s almost as if the Oscar people were waiting for a reason to give her a trophy. I’m calling Avatar for Best Picture, because Hollywood always votes for jobs and Avatar’s $2-billion-plus created a lot of them, and for Bigelow as Best Director because it’s about time. Christoph Waltz and Mo’Nique are locks in the supporting categories. Personally, I’m disappointed that my favourite male performance of the year – Nicolas Cage in The Bad Lieutenant – didn’t even make the speculation list. He must have screwed up in the compulsory figures.
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