Avatar TV spot during Glee can be viewed here (I haven’t found one that can be embedded yet)
I just received a beautiful invite to celebrate the DVD/Blu Ray release of Star Trek.¬† It made me rethink Star Trek for a minute – no, it isn’t that I’m so easily bought by a shiny invite (it is really pretty and swanky). Many pundits have already been predicting Star Trek but I have held back for a couple of reasons. The most important reason is that it came out too early.
Then there was District 9.
And coming soon to an Imax near you, Avatar.
Of these three Sci-Fi films, two so far out of three have been out of the park successes. Both District 9 and Star Trek triumphed at the box office. Both films were considered fairly light weight yet wholly enjoyable. When you think about honoring Best Picture of the Year, shouldn’t you also consider successful films that were well reviewed and greatly loved by the public? Yes, you should. Will they? Hard to say, what with the whole Sci-Fi prejudice going in. Sure, Star Wars and E.T. managed to get in.
Avatar is not just Sci-Fi but it probably counts as fantasy, too – that’s a double whammy against it right off the bat. On the other hand….here is what I know about this year – whether any of this will translate into Academy thinking is impossible to say.
1. In a year when they expanded their nominees to ten something was clearly broken and needed to be fixed.
2. One of the main complaints about them has been that they have marginalized themselves to appeal to a specific group of people, probably that means the collective online, film critics, etc. These have been great films and there are no regrets, but Hollywood is a business, and the Oscars were invented to promote that business, whether that holds true today or not.
3. There is definitely genre prejudice. Dramas, specifically period dramas, tend to get nominated. Comedies are usually shut out (unless James Brooks directed them and they also have a dramatic pull), Sci-Fi has a hard time. Fantasy even harder. Animated has its own category and is usually written off as a result. Foreign Language can sometimes break through if enough people have seen the film and its story is universal enough – were The Lives of Others in contention this year, no doubt it would be among the ten nominated, as would Pan’s Labyrinth.
4. 2009 was not the best year to expand to ten. Therefore, we are looking at a moment where anything can happen.
5. Ergo, Star Trek, District 9 and Avatar (maybe) need to be seriously considered as strong contenders.
Did I just make sense? Or did I chase my tail around like a dog.