Movies Features

Avatar eyes Oscars after Golden Globes success

Jan 19, 2010, 3:38 GMT

James Cameron and Suzy Amis - "Avatar" Los Angeles Premiere - Arrivals - Grauman\'s Chinese Theater - Hollywood, CA, USA © Albert L. Ortega / PR Photos

Los Angeles - With Avatar poised to become the biggest box office success in history, the sci-fi epic's best picture win at the Golden Globes has given the film an air of Oscar inevitability.

'Mortgage your house and put the money on Avatar for Oscar night,' advised the New York Post Monday, after the spectacular 3-D fantasy won Golden Globes for best drama and best director.

The movie was up against its main competition for the Academy Awards - but Up in the Air, Precious, The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds all fizzled on a night when the world, or at least the part of it which gives a hoot about Hollywood awards, was watching.

Among the audience, no doubt, were the 5,835 voting members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, who have until the end of the month to send in their nominations for the Oscars.

Though the Globes are picked by about 90 foreign film journalists in Hollywood who have little correlation to the academy members, they do often pick the same movies for their top prize - 17 of the last 24 times to be exact. In the last five years however, only Slumdog Millionaire has claimed both prizes.

With Hollywood's professionals as worried as the rest of us about the effects of the global recession, they are also likely to be swayed by the globe-spanning success of Avatar, which now looks certain to overtake the 1.8 billion dollars earned by director James Cameron's previous movie Titanic, and become the highest earning film in history.

Just as relevant to industry types: the technological feat of the film's 3-D system has reinvigorated cinema with a new style and mass appeal - something closer to video games than a traditional art-house favourite.

Even the Academy's reputation for choosing high-brow message films over popcorn hits may not be enough to halt the Avatar juggernaut. Far more than he did in Titanic, director Cameron has consistently stressed the political aspect of his movie, even as the jaw-dropping action and special effects get most of the attention.

That was the theme of his acceptance speech at the Sunday night ceremony, in which he cast Avatar not as some high-tech adventure, but more as a new age philosophy treatise in 3-D.

'Avatar asks us to see that everything's connected - all human beings to each other and us to the earth,' said Cameron in accepting the best movie prize. 'If you have to go four-and-a-half light years to another made-up planet to appreciate this miracle of a world we have here, well you know what, that's the wonder of cinema right there, that's the magic.'

Liberal Hollywood film types will no doubt lap that stuff up. But the failure of Avatar to capture any awards for acting, score or screenplay means that however well it does at the box office, its unlikely to yield the record 11 Oscars that were heaped on Titanic.

Tom O'Neil, the awards guru at the Los Angeles Times, believes the movie might struggle to win anything at the Oscars.

'Beware, it's not a slam dunk at the Oscars where a sci-fi film has never won the top prize,' he pointed out Monday. 'Furthermore, the academy is using a weighted ballot to determine the winner out of 10 nominees instead of the usual system of having voters check off one preference out of five alternatives. That means anything can happen, including victories by The Hurt Locker, Up in the Air or Inglourious Basterds.'