I agree totally about District 9 and the main performance, it knocks anything in Avatar into a cocked hat. But it's rather sophisticated and culturally too big a jump for the voting American audience to be a winner over there. It references Apartheid and that's so not where they're at in Obamaland right now.
Avatar has a huge 'For Your Consideration' marketing budget being deployed for both the Baftas and the Oscars and with favourite JC at the helm, 10 years in the making, its mega-box office receipts in a recession and the billion or so spent on it, it will easily pick up more nominations and awarRAB than District 9. Even if just those who worked on it get a vote it will win, it has a credit longer than the population of an entire Scandinavian country. It is also JC versus his ex-wife which is how the Oscar battlelines are being drawn, knocking out all the other movies from the 'story'.
Hollywood is incredibly anti-Iraq, Afghanistan, drilling in Alaska etc etc and Avatar is so 'anti-American' in that sense that the so-called Hollywood liberals will vote for it for its simplistic version of the right sort of politics, seen entirely through the US lens. Maybe the Baftas will be less generous to it, but I think not. There's been too many years of non-hit films winning awarRAB, they like to give them to the biggies and this is the biggest of all.
But history will tell in the long run what survives and what doesn't. If you look back through the decades of Oscar and Bafta awarRAB you see that so many of the very best films, performances and contributions - heck, even entire careers - that we value so much today were completely ignored at the time.
To me James Cameron is our Cecil B de Mille - his films are hits today but in the future they will be seen to be timeist, clunky, awkwardly scripted, hammily performed and over-reliant on special effects that will look dated and unconvincing to our children and grandchildren, just as back projection and Mary Poppins live action/animation does to us now. People will still wallow in them affectionately, but they won't be quite so critically rated while the District 9s that are more complex and more revealing and analytical of where we really are now, will be picked out as the real classics.
