Best Picture Notes: 'Avatar' And 'The Blind Side' Are Equally Goofy Nominees

I held off on seeing Avatar for quite a while, and part of the reason was that I knew I'd probably see it as part of the Best Picture Showcase, and there are very, very few three-hour movies I want to watch more than once. If I didn't enjoy it, I really didn't want to have to see it twice. (I call this the Benjamin Button Rule, and it is based on bitter experience.)

I didn't enjoy Avatar. Not only did I not enjoy it, but on a bill that included this film, followed by Up In The Air, Precious, The Blind Side, and Inglourious Basterds, it stood out as the one I was least interested in ever seeing again. And it got me thinking: it's very curious that the Best Picture nomination for The Blind Side — a soothing fable designed to give people feel-good messages from a simplistic script — has been totally ridiculed, while the nomination for Avatar — another soothing fable designed to give people feel-good messages from an even more simplistic script — has made it a front-runner.

A plausible winner. Of the Oscar for Best Picture.

One of the first things I tweeted on Saturday after I saw this movie was that if Star Wars had been all about saving the cantina from foreclosure, it would have been a lot like Avatar. Why? Dumb story, look-at-me visuals. The visuals are so labored in Avatar, in fact, and they are presented with such obvious drum rolls, that their effect was largely lost on me, because as great as I might have thought a particular panorama was, it was clear that I'd never be as in love with it as James Cameron was.

It's fine to admire Cameron's technical advances with the movie — what he did with motion capture is clearly an advance in the sense that certain aspects of it moved the idea of CGI films forward. But the question becomes: in service of what?

The Na'vi aren't that far from Sandra Bullock, after the jump.

 

My other observation was that it reminded me of an incredibly gorgeous web site design where all the text was the dummy nonsense Latin that's used to fill space and avoid distraction. Avatar works well as a demonstration of technology — particularly for other filmmakers who might use it for, say, better films.

But consider this, for a moment: If Cameron had made the movie with actors in rubber masks, and he hadn't used special motion capture or a special camera — if he had made it as a conventional sci-fi movie — how good would it be?

I posit that it would be a very, very bad movie, for several reasons.

1. Every character in it — the hero, the scientist, the plucky girl, the stern father, the spiritual mother, the gawky assistant, every character — is an utter stereotype. It's not just derivative (though it's derivative in a way that's sometimes embarrassing to watch); it's aggressively uninteresting, from a character standpoint.

In particular, the Colonel played by Stephen Lang, who is the primary villain, kept seeming like he belonged in another movie, and I couldn't place it and couldn't place it. At the end, when he finally winds up driving what's essentially a very thinly veiled rip-off of a Transformer, I figured it out: he should be yelling at little Army men in Toy Story.

2. The love story is severely underdeveloped, left to rely primarily on a montage like something out of The Karate Kid, in which Jake is trained by Neytiri. Their first meeting, where her best explanation for why she saved his life is that he was landed upon by hundreds of jellyfish bugs that suggest he is special, makes no sense at all. If she is saving him because he's been "chosen" or he has a "strong heart," then why does she later act like she resents being asked to be his trainer? If he has such a strong heart and the jellyfish bugs have given him the all-clear, why wouldn't she assume that it was her responsibility to teach him? Perhaps even an honor? When did the jellyfish bug endorsement wear off?

3. It's endless. The battles are too long, the hunting sequences are too long, the back-and-forth between the human and Na'vi world is too long, and every single scene involving Giovanni Ribisi as the unobtainium corporate weasel has no need to be there. Very, very few movies need to be 162 minutes long — basically, only those that have a great deal of story to tell. This one has very little story to tell — even many who like it will tell you so — and its length is almost unbelievably indulgent.

These are the basics. If there weren't the visual effects, this would be widely condemned as a Waterworld-like stinker, it seems to me, and visual effects, no matter how stunning, simply are not good enough to elevate a film from utterly ordinary to the best film made all year. Whatever awards are showered on Avatar for technical achievements, for visual effects, for anything in that category, it can claim to deserve. But the concept of taking a movie with a story this dopey and pretending it's better than Precious, better than Inglourious Basterds, better than The Hurt Locker — that's ridiculous.

And it's at least as ridiculous as the much-discussed The Blind Side nomination. In many ways, they're there for the same reason: they were event movies. Avatar was the biggest blockbuster of all time by some measures, and The Blind Side is a movie that greatly outperformed expectations by hitting a sweet spot studios are going to be hoping to find again for years. They're both there to tell stories that are reassuring and not very challenging, they both make people feel like they've seen a substantive movie, and they're both infinitely less important than they'd like to be.

I'm not necessarily sorry that Avatar was nominated, for the same reasons I'm not sorry The Blind Side was nominated — it makes some sense to put event movies in the hunt, particularly with an expanded field like this. A couple of popular choices with things to recommend them — for Avatar, it's the effects, and with The Blind Side, it's the performances from Sandra Bullock and an underappreciated Tim McGraw — are fine. If you didn't nominate Avatar, then you'd have the same arguments about snobbery and rejection of the public's tastes that came up last year when The Dark Knight wasn't nominated.

But if you want to talk about movies that are emphatically not the best movies that were made last year, it's really only fair to include Avatar, which has no better a claim to the title than the feel-good family football movie.