Slasher films, pot comedies, anything starring The Rock — there are some movies that no one expects to win Academy Awards. And traditionally, Oscar’s no-fly list has included science fiction. Academy Award-winning films are supposed to be serious, weighty, historical — if your movie takes place in a galaxy far, far away, well, you can leave your tuxedo in the closet until it’s time to accept a somewhat less prestigious prize shaped like a rocket ship.
This year, however, is looking like a breakthrough year for sci-fi, as the alien vehicles “Avatar,” “District 9″ and “Star Trek” have earned critical praise and accolades from the industry groups that tend to foreshadow Oscar nominations. Thanks to a convergence of factors, including the expansion of the best picture category from five movies to 10, the ascendance of the post-”Star Wars” generation in Hollywood and the imposing box office success of James Cameron’s “Avatar,” this Rodney Dangerfield of movie genres looks like it may finally win some respect come Oscar time.
“The academy has always thought of sci-fi as a secondary type of exploitation film,” says Roger Corman, who was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in November, in large part for his role in producing the low-budget sci-fi films that gave directors like Cameron their start. “They’re only beginning to realize that there is seriousness and depth within the genre.”
There is one event, more than any other, that sealed the public image of James Cameron, and that is the last five seconds of his 1997 Best Director Oscar acceptance speech for Titanic. In the second of three speeches he would deliver that night, Cameron quoted Leonardo DiCaprio’s line from his film, “I’m the king of the world! Wahooooooo!” and lifted his trophy triumphantly. “The funniest moment of the whole thing, in retrospect, was the quizzical expression on Warren Beatty’s face after he gave me the Oscar,” Cameron recalled, when I asked him about the speech for my book, The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron. “His expression was like ‘what the fuck were you thinking?’” What Cameron had intended as a heartfelt display of his exuberance had come across instead as self-congratulatory, especially to a room that had already seen Titanic collect most of the awards and box office receipts they hoped would go to their own films.
The delicate art of delivering an acceptance speech comes easily to some—Meryl Streep’s flustered gratitude and Robert Downey Jr.’s laconic wit could be how-to tutorials for the 30-second medium. But Cameron, for all his industry stature, has never seemed entirely at home behind a Hollywood awards podium.
And, perhaps most importantly, do the Na’vi eat quiche?
All topics tackled in this roundtable interview on Warren Olney’s KCRW show To The Point featuring conservative film critic Michael Medved, io9 editor Annalee Newitz, Otis College of Art & Design Film Studies Senior Lecturer Scarlet Cheng, Columbia College Professor of Philosophy Stephen Asma and yours truly.
The Times‘ Dave Itzkoff has a cool front page piece on the controversies swirling around Avatar in which I hold forth on, among other things, the use of allegory in Cameron’s films:
Ms. Keegan said that it was possible to read “The Terminator,” his breakthrough 1984 movie, as an anti-technology polemic, an anti-war film or a modern gloss on the birth of Jesus.
“Or,” she said, “ you could just watch it as a movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger stomps around like a robot.”
The also story quotes sci fi site io9’s editor, Annalee Newitz, who wrote one of the sharpest cultural critiques of Avatar I’ve read yet.
I first stumbled onto Slashfilm a year or two ago, and found it smarter than your average film fan web site, and homier than your average film snob web site. In other words, like talking to your cool friend who actually knows something about movies, but doesn’t make you feel like a tool for never having seen Rashomon. If you haven’t already checked out Slashfilm, and in particular David Chen’s podcast, do. In this episode, David and I talk about The Futurist and I recount a story from early on in the book, when Cameron was filming his first movie, Piranha 2, in a morgue in Jamaica.
In this Los Angeles Times piece running in Sunday’s Calendar section and posted early on Geoff Boucher’s Hero Complex blog, I write about the Academy’s tendency to shun sci fi , and why it may be different this year….