The CampChuck Reviewer

Avatar is the most picture of the year, not the Best Picture. James Cameron, the mastermind and shepherd of the biggest selling movie of all time is the most director of the year, not the Best Director.

Only The Hurt Locker stands a chance of grabbing one or both of the two top Oscar statuettes away from Avatar. The Hurt Locker has critical momentum to do so. About 25% of the time, Best Director and Best Picture don’t go for the same film. However, it’s difficult to fathom Kathryn Bigelow or James Cameron winning for Best Director without pairing it with the Best Picture achievement.

What’s impressive about Avatar? The way Cameron puts visual intensity and imagination on the screen, including the revitalized tool of 3-D. Developing breakthrough technology is laudable back story.

What’s less than impressive about Avatar? Shortchanging an opportunity to write a story as inspired as the special effects. The film is at least 15 minutes longer than his storytelling choices deserve. It props an egocentricity that thinks more is better. With a sliver of his $300 million budget, Cameron might have written a futuristic faceoff that doesn’t essentially retread myriad movie faceoffs.

Whereas Cameron overworked a creatively dressed derivative idea, Bigelow delivered fresh energy throughout. She kept the focus intensely personal. Bigelow -- poised to become the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar -- has not simply added another war film to cinema’s huge pile of war films.

The Hurt Locker sticks tightly with three soldiers in Iraq, a team of three soldiers: a death defier; a level-headed veteran; and a workaday guy who’d much rather be elsewhere. They diffuse bombs. It’s about doing the job. It’s about the personal strain of doing this very dangerous job. It is not about geopolitical commentary. It’s not about a clash of cultures.

I can’t do it. I can’t let my gut convince me that the biggest box office movie ever has to steal the Gold.   The Hurt Locker and director Kathryn Bigelow are the best of the year. I predict they will win the Oscars.

Three other nominated films are also better than Avatar: Precious, A Serious Man, and An Education.

Precious (formally entitled Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire), is almost too rough and raw to recommend. Courageously, it strips virtually all attractiveness and promise out of a young, violated woman. Somehow, Sapphire’s worst-of-the-ghetto story offers a surprisingly life affirming film.

A Serious Man, is almost too hilariously depressing to recommend. In the incomparable hands of the Coen Brothers, it’s an ingenious commitment to a storytelling sufferfest. Starting with a peculiar mini-tale of traditional Jewish character, A Serious Man becomes a modern day Biblical tale where bad things keep happening to a nice Jewish man.

An Education pulls off a tricky storytelling challenge. Carey Mulligan gives the film a coming-of-age elegance. Peter Sarsgaard balances the creepiness of the sexual predator he plays with a charm, humor, and sophistication that won’t be dismissed. A film like this can’t work without an excellent screenplay, and this script is Oscar worthy.

Precious, A Serious Man, and An Education have no chance to win Best Picture. The first two films are too downbeat and too offbeat to poke their excellence beyond the shadow of Avatar. The third lags substantially behind the ambitiousness of the other top mentions in the Best Picture category.

In a bald marketing gambit, the 82^nd Academy Awards now allows ten nominees for Best Picture, rather than the traditional five. It’s almost embarrassing to speak of the second five in the context of the Best Picture award. As ever, five slots would have left room for wondering what would have gotten nominated.

A film like Inglourious Basterds, with the brash reputation and ultra violent antics of director Quentin Tarantino, likely would have kept An Education or perhaps A Serious Man off of a list that only permitted five nominees. Inglourious Basterds rewrites history with a band of warriors dispensing with Nazis right and left.

There’s one particularly talented and problematic Nazi they must deal with. This film is not as clever as Tarantino must always think he is, although everyone seems to have had fun making it. It’s way less brilliant than his Pulp Fiction of so long ago.

A film like Up in the Air hits all its filmmaking (and box office satisfying) notes. It’s considerably more digestible than Inglourious Basterds. Up in the Air also could have bumped either An Education or A Serious Man from a best five competition. Again, we’ll never know.

Despite a fresh chemistry between George Clooney and Vera Farmiga and Clooney and Anna Kendrick (both Supporting Actress nominees), this film should not rate the lavish fanfare it’s received. It’s our trying economic times that boosts this story about a hired gun who fires corporate employees.

Would Up have truly transcended the “second class category” of Animated Feature to share one of five slots? Its story of a widowed old man began in a marvelously innovative and sweet way. Alas, it devolved into familiar chase mentality, including a ho hum adversary. Because of its visual excellence, popularity, and half a great story, Up still manages to nestle pretty readily into a ten slot field.

It’s fun, if not deserving, to see a ballsy sci fi concept like District 9 on the list.  Set in South Africa, this film about violent prejudice toward aliens wags a finger at apartheid. It’s relatively hip on a modest budget, but the hyperactive story of a government worker tainted with alien genes grows tiresome and is quite mean spirited.

Then, there’s The Blind Side. In a way, it’s better than Avatar, if you ignore the glaring notion that perfectly executing an ordinary film misses the Oscar point. The Blind Side gels humor and solid characterizations, including a career revving lead for Sandra Bullock. It beats with heart-filling substance based on a true story.

But please, it’s the white bread, formula analog to Precious. White folks help a hopelessly down-trodden Black teen reach his potential by replanting him into a wholesome upper class life. Precious doubles the disadvantaged aspect and redoubles the trap of a worst case environment. It’s a story of hope and potential, of untypical scrutiny, however rough. That’s a film worth special attention.

Too bad that this ten slot business didn’t shine limelight on a courageous documentary exposé like The Cove or a brilliant and sensitive but clearly peculiar film like Where the Wild Things Are.

The more I churn about this business of ten nominations for Best Picture, the more comfortable I feel about disliking it.