First let me say – I don’t know anything. So don’t attack me - this is just discourse – use it at your own risk.

OK good that’s out of the way. Now to my point.

Avatar should not win the Best Picture Academy Award. If Avatar wins - let's just say I'll experience my own personal hurt locker. Just turning that thought over in my mind in response to the prediction that the King of the world might repeat at Oscar time. The last time James Cameron showed up with Titanic - he won it. I think Avatar is a very deserving film in some regards - and likely will win in these categories Visual Effects, Art Direction, Cinematography, and both Sound Editing and Mixing.  But it has not been nominated in Best actor category and or for its screenplay - so I hold that it should not win Best Picture.

I feel like it would be a detriment to the industry if it does. Actually I think The Hurt Locker will take it but Avatr is a powerhouse and it scares me that it might usurp a much better stories chances. My vote would be for substance over flash. And what does that say about us as a society?  If the current fair in movie offerings is a reflection of the health of society – then an argument might be made that we are heading in the wrong direction.  I think we all know what the hell is going on out there. If reading is at an all time low, mindless consumption is at an all time –high (albeit in the midst of a respite in the current economic season) movies that provide an outsized fantasy escape with stunning visual effects can prosper.

It is within this nexus-in-time where the next bubble building is our robbing ourselves of meaning in this life and in helping to grow that bubble Hollywood has stepped up.  One could say that these films resonate with where the character of the American public currently is stuck – oversized, vacuous, overindulgent, attention deprived, poorly nourished and focus challenged.  Anyone reading that last sentence should get the clear picture that looking inward is not our strong suit. I am not discounting that the film industry is now global and the US studios are heavily dependent on foreign revenues - not at all - but the films are born of the US's film industry not the European or Asian or Indian film industries.

Not so fast. Let’s not forget 2009 Best Picture with Slum Dog Millionaire taking top honors. How do we account for this within the general premise proscribed above?  Wild swings in audience tastes while the inevitable doom and demise of the cinematic art is approaching? Maybe the large blockbuster special effects films open up a gap in the universe – a black hole of desire for meaning collapsing inward from its own weight. This void is occasionally filled by quality character driven films every once in a while one slips through the industry defenses and gets made. Wouldn’t it be awful to say that within our lifetime the cinema as we have known it will cease to exist? Cinema where story is King?

Like anything these two worlds of the gargantuan whiz bang productions anf those films which emphasize script, story and charecterization can co-exist and should. But the powers that be need to balance them more appropriately. How do they do that when corporate profits demand otherwise? There’s the rub or more direly and because even at the margins sex sells… “there is the prophylactic” intentionally muting our movie going experience….who could feel anything under these conditions?

I love the fact that I can attack the negative aspects of the stock market from this curious angle – but this is a whole different theme.

Perhaps global warming offers a metaphor. Or maybe that is overreaching to help cling to some hope that the situation can be rectified by the same slice of humanity hoisting the problem upon itself. Within the overall context of global warming – the scientists tell us we can expect wild variations in the weather – cold where it was hot – hot where it is cold – rain where droughts live and droughts loitering in famous watering holes where ice was the winter bully. More or less we can expect desires and expectations and Hollywood ‘s output to be all over the map as well.

Based on this supposition can we make any predictions in the midst of such a volatile cinematic cultural decline? It would follow that Avatar’s three hour deluge of technical prowess which adroitly covers up it’s vacuous core, more than points to a downward trend, when measured against any film’s ability from the words fade-in to reflect our more humanistic qualities. Perhaps a chasm will open up within the next couple years to reveal a bright and intelligent cinematic surprise awaiting us all – perhaps not but the point is that this should happen more often than it does.  The question remains then of what will befall us in the season of the long trudge across the Texas panhandle of the “dearth of substance”.  Whiling away in the murk of it all I at least I hope we can collectively pick up a book, if not just initially to block the light, from the next shiny outsized object projected at your local cinema.