Avatar: First Oscar Worthy 3-D Movie?

The inherent technical difficulties in the production and distribution of 3-D movies notwithstanding, will James Cameron’s Avatar be the first ever Oscar-worthy 3-D movie?


By: Ringo Bones


Ever since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got started back in 1927 with 2,075 members. This cultural organization composed of producers, actors, technicians and others associated with the film industry had never considered 3-D movies to be Oscar-worthy enough to receive one of their prestigious annually dispensed awards. But will it be eventually changed when the first ever Oscar-worthy 3-D movie called Avatar could win this year’s Oscars?

As a whole, 3-D movies are not known historically to be big box office draws or Academy Award-worthy. When one looks into the 1950s – were most movie buffs believe to be the Golden Age of 3-D movies – its very hard to miss that 3-D cinema usually means B-Movie science fiction and creature feature horror flicks. Even the 3-D version of Jaws – probably the highest grossing 3-D movie before Avatar came along – fall into this category.

Sometimes I wonder if James Cameron’s high statistical probability of box office success was down to his flirtations with Marxist-Leninist socialism. I mean the salient feature of his 1998 remake of Titanic was about class struggle, right? If it worked for Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein’s Potemkin – you know, that 1925 silent film classic about a shipboard mutiny in Odessa – surely, something like it would be a success in today’s capitalism weary post credit crunch world.

Thus came Avatar, a 400 million-dollar anti-imperialism Marxist-Leninist socialism leaning science fiction epic that has been touted as this year’s main Oscar Best Picture contender. Not only because of the technically brilliant use of contemporary state-of-the-art visual effects, but also a story line reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein’s vision of revolutionary idealism set in the backdrop of everyone’s contemporary weariness of capitalism by the masses disenfranchised by the empty promises of the Protestant Work Ethic.

Though the movie Avatar leans more in reminding us on the environmentalist leaning ideals of Friedrich Engels, the salient feature of the movie has always been the critique on where our current “Imperialistic Organized Christianity” is heading. The 2003 invasion of Iraq is just a foreshadowing of the up and coming excesses of the good old days of the Inquisition. The movie – as a morality tale for the supposed present day arbiters of morality – may not be perfect. Nonetheless, it might just prove on what the Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing used to day about science fiction – that they are more social, rather than science, driven stories.