Why Avatar Not Winning Best Picture Is Truly A Good Thing

I have to admit to some satisfaction over the fact that the movie Avatar didn’t simply walk away with every trophy from every Oscar category it was nominated for. I have yet to see the movie. I have no doubt I’ll get around to it when it becomes part of the Netflix offerings. But until then, I’m going to have to rely on trying to make due with the reviews from people I trust and a few from people that I don’t. I have a nephew who thought that the visual and special effects from the Matrix sequels were enough to compensate for the weak storyline that could hardly be recognized as a continuation of the original. So when he said that Avatar was great, I started reaching for the salt shaker.

I did read a lot of reviews that thought the movie’s story was somewhat lacking. There were a ton of jokes that accused James Cameron, Avatar’s producer and director and nurturer, of having raided his budget for writing to help pay for one of his many supercomputers used to generate 3-D graphics some would swear were every bit as good as reality. From what I understand, the movie seems to be a bit like a futuristic remake of Dances with Wolves featuring Kevin Costner released to the public with much fanfare a couple decades ago.

And while that in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, there just seems to be too much reliance on the latest in computerized animation as the sole reason to see this film. There have been other films that have relied on expensive theatrics to make up for their lack of a story. The previously mentioned Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions are two that come to mind. But nothing has been done with such extreme anticipation as Avatar.

What really gets my goat with this film is the fact that its budget, despite the lack of funding for writers, was tremendous. The development of the film itself is rumored to have cost in excess of three hundred million dollars. Throw in the cost for a no holds barred marketing campaign and its heavy reliance on distribution to theaters featuring the latest in three dimension films to assure that it gets the most of people’s attention, the film comes reasonably close to a half billion dollars to produce. And while that might sound like an unreasonable amount to spend on the development of a movie, in the three months since its release, the film has already grossed close to three billion dollars. As fast as its sales are going, there’s little doubt that by the time you finish reading this article the three billion dollar milestone will be broken on its way to the four billion mark.

But somebody had to have enough faith in Mr. Cameron’s dream and his development of film and camera technology to Avatar levels. Somebody was willing to pony up the half billion in order for this film to be produced. What would be the chances of somebody investing even just a healthy fraction of that kind of money in a film by a black producer or a black director?

The last time somebody had faith in doing something new and unheard of with anything remotely resembling a black genre was probably the made for television mini series Roots based on the book with the same name by Alex Haley. These films centered around the life of the enslaved African Kunta Kinte, played by LeVar Burton and John Amos, and the lives of his descendents. By every measure the film was an overwhelming broadcast success. But its 1977 budget of six million dollars pales in comparison to an Avatar sized film budget. Even if we adjusted to 2010 dollars we are only talking about no more than forty million dollars.

It is inevitable. Somebody will say if black people want to see black films in the vein of Avatar then black people should do it for our own. Whoever says that will have a very minor point unworthy of its distraction from the real issue. After all, when James Cameron went to sell his story of the Na’vi, the native people on Pandora where Avatar takes place, to his financiers nobody told him to let the Na’vi pay for their own movie. We seem to reserve such disdain for people in the black community who talk about racial disparity in the selective production and investment in movies. And like many things that fall along racial lines, the black community seems to come up short out of this comparison.

So when I see a big budget film like Avatar with its visual orgy of computer graphics lose out to its more mundane competition, I see this as an extremely good thing. Maybe in the future people who finance these films will be more apt to take their half billion dollars and invest in the development of a couple dozen films instead of putting all of their eggs in one basket. And out of those couple dozen films, there just might be one or two that might be a film with a black theme.