Recapping the 2010 Academy Awards
By Edward Mason
Am I the only one that felt more than a little disappointed in the Academy Awards this year?
The Academy gave the Best Picture award to Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, a film that was tantamount to a two-hour army commercial, gave the award for cinematography to Avatar, a film that contained less live action than Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and totally snubbed Wes Anderson’s aptly named Fantastic Mr. Fox in favor of whatever Disney/Pixar CG animation put out this year.
This is not to say that there were not bright spots though, because there were, but I am not here to address those. People often claim that the Oscars are more about politics than anything else, and this may be true, but let us not forget that this is the awards ceremony that has chosen Slumdog Millionaire and No Country For Old Men in the past two years for Best Picture. Danny Boyle and the Cohen brothers, respectively, were more than deserving of the award.
I could go on about the quality awards that have been given out in recent years, but I digress; the point remains that the inequities of this year’s awards need to be addressed. As mentioned, The Hurt Locker was so pro-Iraq war that I cannot imagine how James Cameron could claim it could become the Platoon of this generation. Oliver Stone demonstrated the futility of war and all its horrors, whereas Bigelow made a failed attempt at showcasing masculinity and heroism disguised as a soldier addicted to the rush of war.
We are supposed to be in awe of the valor of Jeremy Renner’s character and how well he serves his country; it truly would be the equivalent of having John Rambo on screen as a paradigm for freedom. Only, we like Rambo because he’s fiction, and the thought of adrenaline-fueled soldiers who cannot shut out the war would honestly scare us. Bigelow is not being apolitical here; she has a clear agenda to drum up that old cliché of “support the troops.” The film screams, “Look at how intense these soldiers are!,” “Look at how brave they are!,” “Look at what they are willing to go to for you!” Yet, that is the problem—the film never raises the questions that need to be asked about the war. It never posits that giant hypothetical “Why?”
My complaint with Avatar wining for cinematography does not stem from any kind of ideological issue per se, but rather from the fact that it is essentially an animated film. To be perfectly honest, I have not seen James Cameron’s latest venture to spend all of the world’s money, and I have no intention to. I believe that this explosion of CGI in films, in addition to usually looking horrible, cheapens the cinematic experience. There is no need to be original or creative anymore because you can fake verisimilitude with computers. We would never have seen astounding, imaginatively unique films like Clash of the Titans (1981) or 2001: A Space Odyssey if they had been sterilized by soulless computer-enhanced effects. If Avatar would have been made by Michel Gondry and rendered with painted cardboard cutouts and stop motion animation, the world would have been a far better place.
Cameron spent enough money that they had to give the film some award, though. So, in all honesty, my dissatisfaction is ideologically based, but even so, it seems a bit of an oversight to give an award for achievement in cinematography to a film predominantly made up of animated visuals. Why not nominate other animated films for the award then?
This leads me to my next point. Why not give the award to Fantastic Mr. Fox? Wes Anderson deserved to win something for this film, and we all know that Best Animated film was earmarked for Up since before the movie was released. I understand that, despite my distaste for CGI, Up was not by any means of the word bad, but the Academy should rename the category “Best Disney/Pixar Animation” if it plans on giving the award to whatever sentimental computer-generated movie the studios put out every year. I can already see the people working on Toy Story 3 making room for the Oscar they are going to win next year.
In all honesty, though, it wasn’t a great year for film, really. The only nominee for Best Picture that I even enjoyed was Inglourious Basterds, and even then it was only pretty neat. So, maybe we should cut the Academy a little slack. But let’s recap what was learned by this year’s Oscars: love America and war; don’t be innovative; and Disney is your god. Important lessons one and all.
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