The Phoenix's own Siskel and Ebert: Part II

The Oscars are arbitrary, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love them. It’s like March Madness for film geeks, but unlike college basketball you can’t rely on any empirical data like stats. It’s all randomness; it’s all an issue of inter-Hollywood politics and posturing. So who has postured best and posed themselves to win big? Certainly, and here I’m not saying anything radical, it’s those two very different films by those two equally overrated former spouses, James Cameron’s Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker.

 

A part of me wants to complement either film – Avatar for it’s technical accomplishments and Hurt Locker for its underdog success; however, I am the angry-looking gentleman in the photo, so I feel obligated to lather on the hate instead.

 

For once my esteemed colluege Mr. Fisher is correct, James Cameron and Avatar are easy targets for derision. Part of why this is so easy is how incredibly invested Cameron seems in his own often laughably cheesy opus. I mean this is the man who said, “I see you, Golden Globe,” in Na’vi. If James Cameron, that perfectly self-contained ball of arrogance, is allowed another forum in which to speak his own made-up language I might just lose it. After all, wasn’t the 1998 Titanic sweep enough un-deserved Oscars for one filmmaker’s lifetime? Okay, maybe not un-deserved, but at least excessive. James Cameron is like a stray dog, you may think you’re rid of him, but once you start feeding him Oscars he’ll just come back for more. Avatar may have sold a lot of popcorn, but in my opinion it’s nowhere near worthy of Hollywood’s highest honor.

 

Then again Gladiator won Best Picture in 2001. Anything can happen out there, and anything, apparently, will. Except for Up or District 9 taking it: call it a hunch but I can’t see either of these winning the big show. Snubs of the year: Best Actor films A Single Man and Crazy Heart are both conspicuously missing. WTF of the year: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince up alongside Michael Hanake’s The White Ribbon for best cinematography. 

 

This brings us to Kathryn Bigelow and the Hurt Locker. Part of me wants to support her, but that’s the part that has bought into the hyped-up narrative of feuding former spouses that Oscar watchers have been promoting ever since the candidates went public. Don’t buy into it. Equating the overblown Avatar with the critic-darling Hurt Locker is like comparing apples and giraffes. Neither will win. Avatar is destined not to win Best Picture (my money is on Precious or Up in the Air, my heart is with Inglourious Basterds), simply because that would make these new “populist” Oscars simply too predictable. A win for Hurt Locker would make it too snobbish. The truth is nobody likes The Hurt Locker. Not a soul outside the Lake Street Screening room really cares that this is the best Iraq war film ever made. Iraq war films are terrible, and most of the war film fans I’ve spoken too seriously denigrate The Hurt Locker roundly as uneventful, self-aware and most of all, boring.

 

So is it really between Precious and Up in the Air? I don’t know. I don’t have any crystal ball. In fact, I haven’t even seen most of these films – oh ironies of ironies, as this year I have seen perhaps three or four times as many films as usual. In my opinion Inglourious Basterds is the real best film of the year, neck-and-neck with A Serious Man. Both of these are among the new 10-candidate Best Picture Nominee’s, but I don’t believe they’ll win. For these deserving films (as well as the other two true underdogs, Up and District 9) the little golden statue may as well be made of unobtainium.