James Cameron Calls Out Academy on Bias Against Blockbusters
James Cameron was salty back in 2009 when Avatar fell short of the Best Picture prize, though it did win Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, and Best Art Direction. It's box office take wasn't too bad, either. Jump forward to 2017. Cameron has not produced a new film since, and is still at work on four sequels to that 2009 blockbuster hit. But he does have something to say about the Academy and its insistence on ignoring blockbuster films.
“There have been a few times throughout the history of the Oscars where a wildly popular film was well-received, but your typical year the Academy takes the position of: ‘It is our patrician duty to tell the great unwashed what they should be watching,’ and they don’t reward the films that people really want to see—that they’re paying money to go see—and they’re telling them, ‘Yeah, you think you like that, but what you should be liking is this.’ And as long as the Academy sees that as their duty, don’t expect high ratings.
"Expect a good show, and do that duty, but don’t whine about your ratings. Titanic was a very unusual case. I’m not saying it’s a better film than films before or after, or it was necessarily a better year in general, but it was a film that made a boatload of money and got a lot of nominations. The next time we see that, we’ll see ratings go up. It’s that simple.”
Oscar producers and ABC certainly want to see viewership climb, that's no secret. But people want to see films like The Dark Knight get nominated for Best Picture. A year after that, the year Avatar was nominated, the category was expanded to ten. But it hasn't made a huge impact on the number of commercial hits getting nominated for the top prize.
"“There’s definitely a bias. The Academy still has a majority of its members that are actors. Look, I love actors, but that’s how they think—they’re generally skeptical of technology. So when they see a film that’s too dependent on visual effects, they say, oh, that’s not an acting movie. Well Titanic was a visual effects movie in sheep’s clothing, you know? Yes, it had visual effects, but it was about the people and about the story," Cameron continued.
"The visual effects were eclipsed by that. But if you do a movie like Avatar, the effects are right out front, and even though I felt the acting was just as good, and the story we were telling was just as good, they’re not going to reward it the same way. That’s just a fact of life. I had made a decision way before Titanic that I wasn’t going to serve two masters: I was going to put my visual cinema first. Even though I’ve spent an awful lot of time on scripts and on performance, I still love doing big, visual cinema. I doubt I’ll even get nominated again, but if I did, I’m probably going to lose to a Woody Allen movie. That’s the nature of it. So you don’t try to serve two masters.”
Source: Collider
