Dear WTF?,

You are right about the Yes art. I had a couple of Roger Dean's posters on my walls as a teenager often wishing I could escape into them. Probably another reason Avatar put me in a headlock.

Imagine a substance trip with Avatar instead of swirling fluro paisley patterns.

Have you caught Hurt Locker yet?

My score card looked like this:

Hurt locker: No much of a plot, more a "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" style thing. But the plot was just a framework for exploring the characters and situation, so perhaps fair enough. The situation being explored was war. There have been a number of memorable war movies exploring different aspects - documovies like Black Hawk Down, Behind Enemy Lines, Saving Private Ryan. Hurt Locker wasn't a scratch on any of them. Then there war movies exploring morality and ethics, like The Thin Red Line and Apocalypse Now. If Hurt Locker was an attempt at exploring ethics, it was pathetic. The cinematography serviceable. No stand out scenes like say the shopping bag scene in American Beauty, but it did the job. So now we move onto the heart of Hurt Locker. It was a character study, and yes it was very good. But not outstanding, I've seen better, Schindler's List being one example.

For the most part the same comments apply to Avatar. The plot was just a framework some something else. At least it was honest about it - a movie about obtaining unobtainium is not making a statement with its plot. Avatar wasn't intent on exploring ethics or morals, as the situation was painted in a fairly tale like manner, with everything in black and white. Unlike Hurt Locker there were no interesting character studies, no one struggling with a unique outlook on life, no one called upon to take some momentous personal decision. But then that wasn't the point of Avatar either. Cinematography is what Avatar was about. All the other things were just support for what was in essence a 3 hour visual feast. So was it a visual feast, of the likes no one on the planet had seen before? I thought so.

So neither movie had major Oscar killing flaws. But only Avatar did something extraordinaryly well. And that is why it should have won.

@wobbles: I also found the 3D a bit distracting, particularly for objects out of focus in the foreground.

Interestingly wobbles, for most of the movie that wasn't a problem. The beauty of CGI is everything is in focus, all the time. So while it is true the conventional scenes were out of focus and I like you found it distracting, that was only for what, 1/2 an hour of a 3 hour film.

As for why it didn't win, I suspect it was more of a case of the dinosaurs voting against the tide. For the same reason, I suspect the first talkies would have had a hard time taking home an Oscar, as would the first movies shot in colour. Avatar is a bigger change than those two. Many of the usual artists found in movie making are no longer needed - lighting, sets, makeup, costumes. All replaced by computers, programmers and "photoshop experts". How could a dinasour bring itself to vote for _that_. I bet they found it hard to even call it a movie.

rstuart,
To be specific, the distracting parts where when there was something close to the camera in the foreground that was out of focus - not a problem in 2D but in 3D these became indistinct weird flat solid objects.

It wasn't a criticism of the film, just the technology - which is admittedly still in its infancy.

Dear wobbles,

Give me Avatar's 3D any day over Hurt Locker's 'Unsteady Cam'. There was no way my wife would have made it past the first 30 minutes.

Dear rstuart,

Pretty damn spot on critiques I would say and I think your score card pretty well matches mine.

I would probably rate Hurt Locker's cinematography a little high than you did though. The blast scenes were among the best I have seen plus that very memorable moment where Renner's character Sergeant First Class William James pulls up the wires leading to unexploded bombs all pointing at him. The overhead shot was to me very effective. Talk about a fly caught in a web. Top shot in my opinion.

Regarding war movies, for me Apocalypse Now was the ultimate especially the director's cut. I was a youngster living in Mindanao when the film was shot. The helicopters were Philippine military operated and kept being called away from the set for use in combating Muslim rebels operating not far from us. Now that was a film.

I have just finished reading 'Novel without a name' by Duong Thu Huong. First published in 1995 it is the story about Quan, a North Vietnamese soldier who spent ten years at war. What is so striking about the book is the total lack of emphasis on battles which are only mentioned as an aside. Quan ends up being one of only 19 survivors on the 100 plus in his company. The focus instead is on the characters away from the fighting.

Realising the author was female I had assumed the reason for this was that she didn't have the experiences to draw on to accurately depict these scenes. Researching her I found this was not the case.

From Wikipedia

Duong Thu Huong volunteered to serve in a women’s youth brigade on the front lines of “The War Against the Americans". Duong spent the next seven years of the war in the jungles and tunnels of Binh Tri Thien, the most heavily bombarded region of the war.”

“She was one of three survivors out of the forty volunteers in that group. She was also at the front during China’s attacks on Vietnam in 1979 during the short-lived Sino-Vietnamese War.”

The lady also spent 7 months in prison for writing the book.

I would put the proposition that we Westerners are far more likely to focus on the battle minutia while this very Eastern sensibility saw character depiction as far more important and the actual fighting as somehow almost irrelevant. Or perhaps it is just a woman's perspective.