A Chick Wins Best Director Honor, Men Blame Political Correctness
Why did so many people think that Avatar deserved to win Best Picture and Best Director at the 2010 Oscars? Because it made boatloads of money? Because CGI has never looked so good? Because James Cameron’s ego needed a golden man to go next to his Golden Globe? Just because a lot of people like something doesn’t mean it is high-quality. Has anyone ever noticed that Jennifer Lopez can’t sing well at all? She’s made a lot of money off of album sales, though. And that whole Twilight saga? Millions upon millions of dollars coming in when I couldn’t even make it to page 15 in the first book without a strong latte, several yawns, and a wish that I brought something else to read.
At last night’s Academy Awards, despite Avatar having trounced The Hurt Locker at the Golden Globes, Kathryn Bigelow got to look back at her ex-husband and his big budgets blockbusters and laugh. The Hurt Locker, a film about real people—none of them played by bankable “movie stars”—who defuse bombs in Iraq, took home the Best Picture Oscar, and Bigelow won for Best Director. It was the first time ever (really, ever!) that a woman won the Best Director category. And it was for a film that really didn’t make that much money. It took in about $21 million compared to Avatar’s $2.5 billion.
"Tell Jim he can check his ego over THERE."
But it was Kathryn Bigelow, dressed in a silver-gray gown and a single bracelet encrusted with diamonds, who accepted the award from Barbra Streisand (who was characteristically draped in diamonds). And now the discussion has become all about why she ‘really’ won. I hear some of the guys around me (all of whom clearly have some kind of a death wish) saying that she won not because she deserved the award, but because the Academy felt that they needed to give the award to either Bigelow for her two x-chromosomes or Lee Daniel for his blackness.
Uh-huh.
Everyone knows, after going through the recent Presidential election, that Americans are more likely to honor a black man than a white woman. Icky girl parts turn voters of all kinds off. Unless they’re really, really deserving of something.
The members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have to exercise a bit of self-control when it comes to ticket sales. How do you honor a movie that was computer-generated? How do you honor a director who reveled in a plot as overused as the Lindsay Lohan Suite at the Betty Ford Clinic? Yeah, I liked that whole storyline—the “savage natives” turning out to be kind victims of the destruction of their environment and all—when it was called Pocahontas and I read it as a child. I even endured the same plot when it was remade as Dances with Wolves. I’m over it now. I get it. Whitey is killing the planet. Can we move on?
The Hurt Locker is relevant, real, moving, and, at times, funny. It is a snapshot of right now, and well-framed. Kathryn Bigelow directed actual people and made relative-nobody Jeremy Renner a star. The “who?” of several months ago scored Jessica Simpson’s phone number at an industry party last week. And he didn’t have to dye himself blue to do it.
James Cameron claims to be proud of his ex-wife, but we all know that when he got home and changed into his Avatar pjs and climbed between his Avatar sheets, he was crying into his Neytiri pillowcase.