Best Picture Nominee – Avatar

I was recently asked to contribute to LAMB Devours the Oscars over at the LAMBs. They are providing a 33 day commentary on each category and Best Picture nominee until the night of the awards show. Please visit their website to view all of the other nominees and categories and the wonderful bloggers who have taken the time to write about them.  Thanks!

–This Guy Over Here.

Best Picture Nominee: AVATAR

It’s always nice to see a low-budget independent film with little-to-no buzz finally get the attention it deserves. James Cameron has been suffering for attention nearly his entire career; finally his ship has come in. Oh wait, that horrid pun made me smell my own ironic humor. Get it? Because “ship” could mean “Titanic” and that was his other juggernaut of a film. Do you get it?

On February 2^nd, 2010 Avatar was officially graced with nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. This fact should be completely disassociated with the fact that on January 26^th, 2010 it became the highest grossing film of all time with eight hundred quadrillion dollars. It was nominated because of its spectacular spectacle… right?

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82nd Academy Awards Blogathon: Best Picture

Nominees: Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air

When the nominees were announced on February 2nd, I was super excited at the diversity in the ten best pictures. Naturally people will grumble that certain films were left out ((500) Days of Summer, Star Trek, Where the Wild Things Are,) and that some shouldn’t have been included (The Blind Side,) but all in all it’s quite exciting.

Here we have two science fiction films nominated for best picture, a handful of films with pulse pounding action, quirky dramas, and a film that completely rewrites history. More than anything, it seems this year the Academy is celebrating the fun that we can have at the theater.

For the first time since Beauty and the Beast in 1991, an animated film has been nominated for Best Picture, (well one and three-fourths if you count Avatar as animated.) Two of the nominated films debuted in 3-D, there’s a number of independent films, big blockbusters, and… The Blind Side…

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