Avatar Loses at Oscars

Those I know who saw Avatar say it's a great movie. But all I see when I watch snippets of it on TV is something resembling a video game. I don't think it looks all that realistic. And I'm not in any hurry to go see the movie.

Avatar was up for best picture and best director (James Cameron) at the Academy Awards Sunday night, but it was bested by the low-budget war movie The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow (the first female Oscar win for director). I'm not so hot on seeing that one, either. Maybe I'm just not an avid movie-goer, I don't know.

Sometimes I feel like that sinister lead character of Alex DeLarge, played by Malcom McDowell in the movie A Clockwork Orange. As part of the violent hoodlum's "rehabilitation", DeLarge is tied up facing a movie screen, with his eyelids held back and his head held fast so that he HAD TO watch the movie ahead of him. That's kind of the feeling that I (without DeLarge's violent tendencies) get when sitting in a full theatre with the big screen in front of me. I sit there and feel like I'm the captive target of hundreds, if not thousands of career individuals and teams whose main goal is to bombard my mind with their agendas and make me walk out of the experience changed, according to their purposes.

My family all loves having a wide-screen television, but it frankly does very little for me. I think they like something that emulates the movie theatre effect, but even the widest of these television screens doesn't approach the captivating (and quite disturbing) effect of being essentially confined at stretches to a seat in a theatre in the darkness, with people generally unreceptive to distractions. The idea there is complete mesmerization and immersion into the media's message. At home, distractions to viewing, even when unwelcome, are ubiquitous and conducive to critical reaction. In the theatre, the viewer just sits there soaking it all in.

Having said all that, I have to note that the ultimate mind-melding medium, virtual reality, has yet to be realized. When it does come into fruition, all of these high-tech movies that marvel so many will be laughed at like those primitive science fiction movies of the fifties and sixties are now. But at least with virtual reality, viewer participation may be possible. Of course, at some point that technology may become so "real" that the participant may reach the state of not knowing whether he or she is in reality or still "plugged in".

Maybe I'll go see Avatar; my family seems pumped up to go see it a second time and I might tag along. Then again, maybe I won't. I am already just a little peeved at James Cameron for so publicly coming out in support of President Obama's recent decision to essentially abandon our manned space program. What makes Cameron so high and mighty? Let someone else have my seat at his grand movie's showing. Hey, I bet it didn't even make runner-up for the Oscar! [I know, I'm guilty of sour grapes: read Aesop's Fables]