Somnopolis

Actor in a Leading Role – Jeff Bridges

Actor in a Supporting Role – Christopher Plummer/ Christoph Waltz(It’s the Battle of the Christophers!)

Actress in a Leading Role – Sandra Bullock

Actress in a Supporting Role – Mo’Nique (in the bag – see Robert Downey’s speech from Tropic Thunder)

Animated Feature Film – Up

Art Direction/ Cinematography/ Sound Editing/ Sound Mixing/ Visual Effects – Avatar (sfx extravaganzas sweep the techies)

Costume Design – Coco Before Chanel (It’s Chanel!!)

Directing – Kathryn Bigelow (Cameron’s too much of an ego, Reitman’s too callow, Tarantino’s too much….no one knows who Lee Daniels was and we don’t wanna go give a social realist director a big head. That’s not what the Oscars are about)

Documentary (Feature) – The Cove (those poor widdle dolphins! Plus it replaces the need for liberal America to actually *do* something about Japanese animal cruelty that could lead to an international incident)

Film Editing – Inglourious Basterds

Foreign Language Film - “The White Ribbon” – Germany (Hollywood pretends it ‘gets’ Haneke)

Makeup - “Star Trek” (see Avatar and ‘techie’, principle)

Music (Original Score) “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (Which I want to win – but it won’t)

Music (Original Song) - “The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)” from “Crazy Heart” Music and Lyric by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett

Best Picture “The Hurt Locker”/“Up in the Air” Daniel Dubiecki, Ivan Reitman and Jason Reitman, Producers (too close for me to call)

Short Film (Animated) “A Matter of Loaf and Death” Nick Park (darker than previous entries, but still excellent)

Writing (Adapted Screenplay) “In the Loop” Screenplay by Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche (Iannucci is the voicepiece for Liberal British guilt vis a vis the war atm)

Writing (Original Screenplay) - “The Hurt Locker” Written by Mark Boal (it comes as a shock to everyone that films are ‘written’!)

Throwing aside everything I’ve said…the Oscars are not about merit, or what are the ‘best’ films. They’re about promoting cinema. No film this year has done more to promote the idea of visiting the cinema than Avatar. It’ll make a killing, there can be no doubt.

Marissa Tomei won an Oscar. ‘cough’.

Avatar Traileraddicts exclusive here

Why oh why does James Cameron’s ‘latest masterpiece’, insist on being so underwhelming? What exactly is it that resists audience enthusiasm so effortlessly?

Is it the Smurfs? A lot of people think it’s the Smurfs. Ferngully is another point of comparison.

The media coverage reminds me of the distinct atmosphere of critical knives being sharpened that preceded the release of Titanic. That didn’t pan out though for the poison pen brigade. So a critical drubbing, it may be felt, is overdue. The revelation in this New Yorker profile that Cameron likes to sign post-it instructions with ‘Jim Out!’ didn’t help.

Yet I don’t accept either of these conclusions. Watching the trailer above it is clear that Cameron is revisiting past glories, to diminished returns.

Avatar is a day-glo version of Aliens. The presence of Sigourney Weaver was, I assumed, meant to be a cameo. Instead the trailer indicates an ongoing role for her in the movie, perhaps even an action sequence or two. Michelle Rodriguez features in the film, ticking the requisite ‘masculine female’, aspect of Cameroonian films (see also Vasquez in Aliens, Sarah Connor in T2…..Jaimie Lee Curtis in True Lies……who has been the subject of numerous chinese whispers that she was born dual-sexed). In fact the Cameron’s euphemistically described ‘interest in strong women’, has always struck me as an odd fetishization of women, or men with tits. See also his odd reply to a question at this year’s Comic-Con regarding the progress on filming and future projects:

“You know, it’s not a great time to ask a woman if she wants to have other kids when she’s crowning.”

What really bugs me though is the run-through of the military as unwitting tools of cynical business conglomerates and blinkered command. Giovinni Ribisi’s character is a rethread of Burke, the slimy suit who tricks Ripley into returning to the doomed planet in Aliens. The grunts themselves are once again basically decent sorts who find themselves over their heads on unfamiliar terrain against a species that can overcome their advanced technology and fire-power through sheer numbers.

Aliens borrowed imagery from America’s nightmarish war in Vietnam to dress up its gritty space antics. This was commended over the years as a welcome degree of subversion, with Cameron as the wily Canadian plumbing the US collective consciousness for trauma, much like his fellow countryman David Cronenberg (although in a more ham-fisted manner).

Yet while we are living through ongoing wars on two fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Cameron returns to the same fixtures as before, despite the horrors of this conflict being displayed each evening on the news. Meanwhile this day-glo farce has been preceded by an actual contemporary Iraq war film, The Hurt Locker, by Cameron’s ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow. Why any man would attempt to allegorise the illegal conflict in the Middle-East with a cartoon that owes more to World of Warcraft than bodies returning to Dover Air Force base I do not understand. It is a failure of resolve, a disgraceful retreat into spectacle and the techno-fetishism of immersive CGI.

This is the future of cinema? More like its castration.

Anyway, this is an Avatar I much prefer.