Issue date: 3/18/10 Section: Opinions

Was Avatar robbed of the Oscar for Best Picture? Art: Corrie Jackson

I would like to preface this article by saying this first and foremost: I thought The Hurt Locker was an incredible movie. I did, I really did. It was well written, tense, and exciting. It "blew me away," so to speak. But Avatar was something special. Avatar changed the game. Let me explain.

Let's start with the Awards themselves. Oscar 2010 is not your daddy's Oscar. He's been working out. The Academy put Oscar 2009 on a diet and cut the fat, trimming down the notoriously bloated show. You may have noticed that they cracked down on long-winded acceptance speeches, where people thank individuals that you've never heard of, and frankly, you don't really care about. For the most part, this was successful.

However, the most noticeable difference this year was the doubling of Best Picture nominees to ten films. This, undoubtedly, was to allow for big-budget mainstream movies like Inglourious Basterds to be included. The Academy included these nominations simply to avoid offending the "average guy" audience. When The Dark Knight was snubbed for a Best Picture nomination last year, a lot of people were frustrated. Millions of people knew it was the Best Picture of 2008, and as such, didn't care about Oscar 2009.

The Academy realized their misstep, and in one clever move they nominated extremely popular movies to appease the masses. It worked. This year's show had the best ratings since 2005. For the movie-inclined, it was a thinly-veiled ruse. But for Joe the Plumber and hockey moms across North America, it was hope. False hope, however, because most of these movies had no chance whatsoever. Except Avatar.

You can argue that Avatar is simply a mainstream money-maker. I think it was more than that, and I can honestly say that it deserved the hype. If anything, it finally justified 3D, a mode of filmmaking that has lately been so gimmicky. I suppose Beowulf was kind of interesting, but its 3D was still a shtick. Avatar just popped. It was beautiful. It looked alive. It transported you to Pandora. Forgive me, but my experience with Avatar feels like how I think the French felt when the Lumière brothers wowed the world with the first moving images. It was like seeing a movie for the first time again.

You may have had issues with the story and dialogue, and I think you would have a very legitimate point. I personally had no issues with either, probably because I was still so enraptured by the scale and detail of the world Cameron had envisioned. What we must remember is that film is still a visual medium. When I saw Avatar, I turned off my brain, adjusted my eyes, and allowed myself to become immersed. No other movie has done that for me to that degree, and I feel that a movie with that potential needs to be recognized.

It got the nomination, and that was the first step. But Avatar has changed the film industry, which is still rather new in relation to other art forms. Video games, an even newer medium, have had the fortune to grow up during a technological revolution in computer generated graphics. Gaming has shown signs of genuine immersion, and it's not stopping. Film is still catching up. Avatar is cinema's attempt at the immersion that video gaming has monopolized so heavily, and I loved it.

I understand why The Hurt Locker won. It truly was a great film. However, if I was going off the typical parameters of a Best Picture film, I argue that Up in the Air was the better choice, a film that has stuck with me for a long time. In other words, if I had to choose a "highbrow" film, it wouldn't have been The Hurt Locker. But I think Avatar was highbrow it its own way, and its Oscar nomination justifies my point.

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