AVATAR and Hollywood Post-Feminist Doctrine

For the first time since 1943, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated ten films for the Best Picture Oscar. Only one of the five films nominated for best director will win the award:

Avatar
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds (Can I write "Inglourious" in Blogspot [;^>) ?)
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (has to be the longest, most-pretentious nominee title since Doctor Strangelove)
Up in the Air

Dark Victory Gone with the Wind Goodbye, Mr. Chips Love Affair Mr. Smith Goes to Washington Ninotchka Of Mice and Men Stagecoach The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights all received nominations for best film of 1939. I do not think anyone will mistake 2009 for 1939.

AMPAS should have nominated ten films back in 1962. It nominated

David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia which won Best Picture of 1962
and
Mutiny on the Bounty
The Longest Day
The Music Man
To Kill a Mockingbird

In 1962, American producers also gave us

All Fall Down
Advise and Consent,
Bird Man of Alcatraz,
Cape Fear
Carnival of Souls
The Chapman Report
David and Lisa
Days of Wine and Roses
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Gay Purr-ee
Gigot
Gypsy
Hell Is for Heroes
Lolita
Lonely Are the Brave
Long Day's Journey Into Night
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
The Manchurian Candidate
The Miracle Worker
Requiem for a Heavyweight
Ride the High Country
The Road to Hong Kong
Sergeants 3
State Fair
Sweet Bird of Youth
Tender Is the Night
That Touch of Mink
The Trial
Two for the Seesaw
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm
Zotz!

I do not believe anyone will confuse 2009 with 1962.

Thursday evening, I attended a six thirty p.m. showing of James Cameron’s Avatar in 3 Dimension. For the first time, I view a 3-D feature film. As a movie experience, it ranks with the times I viewed four other landmark technological films of blessed memory:

1963 How the West was Won Widescreen Cinerama stereophonic sound
(Viewed with my parents)

1967 The Sound of Music Widescreen Todd-AO stereophonic sound
(Viewed with my parents)

1977 Star Wars
eventually re-titled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Dolby Surround Sound and special effects
(viewed with Randy Stokes)

1997 Titanic Special effects
(viewed with Richard Crookston)

In their ways, these films, plus Avatar felt like revelation.

If Avatar is any indication, the movies of the 21st Century will be very sensuous but hard on the eyes and the inner ear. 3-D certainly made the sets and alien forests come alive. Avatar contains much skin for a PG-13 film: Cameron computer generated a huge alien cast -- mostly nude and blue. 3-D enhanced them as well.

James Cameron does create great plots, but his dialog is first-year film-school stuff. He really should do what his stylistic influences from the classic age of movies -- Victor Fleming and David Lean -- did in the old days. They did not write their own movies: they hired either novelists (Noel Langley) or playwrights (Maxwell Anderson, Robert Bolt, Marc Connally, Sidney Howard) to write their screenplays.

Some complain that Avatar is anti religion. That complaint is silly. It is not often that we encounter a modern movie with both a Tree of Life and a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in it. The film might be at most anti-organized religion, but it certainly has spiritual elements to it.

Some complain that the film is anti-American. The plot is not so much anti-American as it is delightfully anti-business, anti-military, anti-technology. It will dominate and win the technological Oscars: I predict it will win six or seven Oscars. However, Kathryn Bigelow will win best director for The Hurt Locker. A Bigelow win would be good drama. Bigelow is Cameron’s ex-wife and would become the first woman to win the award for best director.

Only four women have received nominations for best director since 1975. Before Lina Wertmuller’s landmark nomination for Seven Beauties, Leni Riefenstahl worked in Germany as a female film director. Had AMPAS awarded a best foreign film Oscar in the 1930s, she might have won best foreign film twice for Triumph of the Will and Olympiad.

Dorothy Arzner deserved at least one directorial nomination. Her best film of the 1930s certainly was better than some of the turkeys nominated for best director in the 1930s. Ida Lupino should have received an Emmy nomination for directing the “A is for Aardvark” episode of Bewitched in 1965 and an Oscar nomination for directing The Trouble with Angels in 1966.

If Ms Bigelow does not win, then AMPAS should award best director to Lee Daniels, only the second black man ever to receive a nomination for best director.

Hollywood has been in bed with big business too long to award an anti-big-business movie the award for best film. It will I bet award best film to the realistic dramatic anti Iraq War film The Hurt Locker.