So the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences REALLY hates James Cameron. Not that The Hurt Locker didn’t deserve to clean up — it did in a big bad way — but one can’t help but look at the winners of categories like Sound Mixing or even Original Screenplay (which Cameron wasn’t nominated for, of course, but a vote for The Hurt Locker was a vote AGAINST Avatar) and not imagine the director’s peers flipping him off as they mail in their ballots. “Who’s Avatarded now?” laughs one Academy member to himself. “King of the world?” asks another. “You’re barely a prince!” And so on with the funny and original puns. For a lot of Hollywood, James Cameron is as easy to hate as a scum-sucking Republican!
But petulant dismissal of a STAGGERING CINEMATIC ACHIEVEMENT aside, the Academy did manage to do one thing right last night: naming Kathryn Bigelow Best Director, the first woman to win the trophy in the ceremony’s 82 years. You’re King Queen of the World, Kathryn! And LONG OVERDUE!
Photo from The New York Times
Not even Babs presenting the award (or Oprah’s wholly inappropriate appearance ten minutes earlier, but that’s an entirely different post…) could ruin what was an undeniably special and important moment in Oscar history. It meant too much; the victory was practically cosmic. And we’ve finally arrived, one hopes, at the beginning of a label-less era of film direction — one where “female” is no longer synonymous with “Nancy Meyers” (and “terrible”), but simply means that the person running the show…happens to have lady-parts. Equality, baby.
Henning
smpage
Lifting Fog 