In what will go down as one of the more controversial Academy votes for best picture, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker ran roughshod over James Cameron’s Avatar on Sunday night in a race that initially was thought of as a cakewalk for the 3D extravaganza.
Talk about a money gap: Since its release in June, Bigelow’s taut Iraq War drama has mustered a measly $14.7 million at the US box office, while her ex-husband’s years-in-the-making epic has in three months grossed $721 million stateside and a whopping $2.6 billion worldwide. Only his other tour de force, Titanic, comes close, with a $1.8 billion worldwide haul.
On the budget side, too, the discrepancy was huge, hers costing $15 million and his $300 million or thereabouts.
So what happened?
A lot of folks were asking that in the wake of Tom Hanks’ bolt to the stage to blurt out the final winner at the end of the overlong, 3-and-a-half hour awards show. The audience hardly had time to gasp before being herded to the exits. Not since, Shakespeare in Love outshone Saving Private Ryan, or Ghandi edged E.T. or, MOST notably, Crash beat Brokeback Mountain has there been such an eyebrow-raising finale.
No doubt there will be a lot of theories, conspiratorial and not, bandied about, even though we arguably never will know what precise mixture of factors contributed and in what percentages.
Even so, The Hurt Locker’s messages were clear and clearly portrayed, and distributor Summit did an excellent job in mounting an awards campaign that appealed to Academy voters across the various industry categories.
Then there’s that preferential voting system, which likely skewed the outcome toward the indie pic. Avatar might have garnered more first-place ballots than any other contender, but probably just as likely it appeared way down on the ballots of other voters who didn’t wish to see it win. The Hurt Locker probably was high on most everyone’s list, benefiting when the second and third place entries were scooped up and re-assigned.
Also playing a role in the selection might have been a predilection for the perceived underdog, and a charming, talented, articulate woman at that, over the self-styled king of the world who no doubt rubbed some Academy members the wrong way the last time he was onstage brandishing the Oscar.
The very idea that a female helmer made the kind of movie heretofore the exclusive reserve and prerogative of male directors also might have been too tantalizing to resist.
More appealing was that a little pic with a difficult story managed the feat of amassing enough dough to shoot under adverse conditions in the Middle East while Fox for years was signing the checks for a helmer hunkered down in a high-tech hangar in West Los Angeles.
Bigelow’s crew faced suspicious crowds, curfews and fusillades; Cameron’s crew faced a bunch of computers.
What do you think? Was the right decision made?
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