Every year I wait for the Oscars with baited breath. The Academy Awards are the like a seal of excellence. A seal that has been decided by industry professionals; not the audience who could be influenced by a number of various things.
This year, however, the excitement had dimmed. Just a tiny bit though. I was still gung-ho about some of my favorite movies winning and achieving that seal of excellence. Then I realized that Avatar was nominated. It was nominated for:
Avatar
Lightstorm Entertainment Production (20th Century Fox)
- Art direction
- Cinematography
- Directing
- Film editing
- Original score
- Best picture
- Sound editing
- Sound mixing
- Visual effects
Of which, so far, by 11:04 pm it has won:
Best Art Direction
WINNER: Avatar
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Nine
Sherlock Holmes
The Young Victoria
Best Cinematography
WINNER: Avatar
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
The White Ribbon
Its 11:41 pm now and Avatar has not won any more awards. And we have the last big two left. Best Directing and Best Picture.
Well the Best Directing was just announced and it went to Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker.
AND IT IS 11:59. BEST PICTURE: NOT AVATAR!
The Hurt Locker won the Oscar for the Best Picture!
Congratulations to Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win the Best Directing Oscar. And The Hurt Locker for winning the Best Picture.
Honestly, I am very glad that Avatar did not win. The reason, you may ask? I liked Avatar. As a 3D movie that I spent a good deal of money on. Yes, it was good. GRAPHICALLY.
The plot line? Filled with holes. Stretched out and very very predictable. Here is one review of Avatar that I thought was spot on.
We normally don’t do movie reviews but this movie was just asking for it. Made on a God-knows-how-many-million-dollars budget, conceptually conceived in an age when Sunny Deol was considered an awesome actor and having used technology that transforms 6 foot men into 10 foot tall smurfs, Avatar has been pretty much the talk of the town, as far as movies go.
The story, which isn’t much to write home about anyways, follows a paraplegic ex-marine Jake Sully, who is mentally linked to the avatar of his deceased twin brother. This avatar is a hybrid cross between a human and a Na’vi, the resident sentient race of Pandora. The program is an initiative to convince the Na’vi to relinquish their land so that humans can mine Pandora for Unobtanium.
What follows is a clichéd tale where Sully assimilates the Na’vi culture and gradually becomes one of them – an angle better visited in The Last Samurai. The romance angle between what’s-her-name and Sully is also half baked and there are almost no tender moments that would indicate any amour, unless you consider hissing like a cat and smiling devilishly as remotely affectionate. And I thank my stars I live in a world where I do not have to go through some crazy testosterone-driven ritual to prove my coming-of-age. Rife chauvinism, the alpha-male dominance and ‘White Man’s Greed’ are some of the other clichés that are peppered generously throughout the movie. Yawn.
I could not help but marvel at James Cameron’s legerdemain. Like a practiced magician, he has diverted attention to something spectacular and gotten away with a substandard backbone. Twice. As with Titanic, where the sinking of the ship was almost incidental, here too the story is, to use my favourite slang word, lame. And twice he’s laughed his way to the bank. The visuals are awesome. No other word for it. The colours are rich, the scenery delightful and the Hanging Mountains took my breath away. Sadly once you leave the theatre, no character really stays behind with you a la Yoda or Darth Vader from Star Wars or Aragorn from LOTR or Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean. And there’s talk about a sequel. . For a movie that takes itself too seriously and was fortuitously released about the same time as the Copenhagen Climate conference 2009 , it fails to do justice to the ecological concerns that it attempts to raise.
Thankfully for Cameron, his ‘shock-and-awe’ tactic, to bombard the viewer with stunning graphics and pray he doesn’t pick out the limp storyline has worked. I give it a 2 on 5 and those points are solely for the visuals. Watch the movie but do not take it too seriously.
And the next person to say ‘A-va-taar’ gets it from me.
Hate mail can be directed to rohan0301@gmail.com. Cheers
.Here is the original post.
When I read this review I thought to myself, "Finally! Someone who understand and can put down into words EFFECTIVELY what I wanted to say about the movie".
What do you think? Are you an Avatar lover? Or an Avatar hater? Or you kinda liked the movie? But didn't love it?
Let me know!
Until next time,
