The Hawkeye

When the nominee slots for the Best Picture Oscar were expanded from five to ten, it seemed like an appropriate opportunity to include other lesser-known films including both the more creative entertainment (500 Days of Summer), films more conscious of their aesthetic (Bright Star) and, more importantly, those belonging to the art-house tradition (Two Lovers, Hunger).

However, the Best Picture nominees for 2010 resemble much of what we've seen nominated before: crowd-pleasers posing as cinematic masterpieces with only some critical support. Enter films like Avatar and The Blind Side, ones more valued by audiences for their generic appeal rather than cinematic value.

Avatar belongs in the Visual Effects category, and The Blind Side in the Best Actress category, but why these films with the majority of the other Best Picture nominees were placed seems to have more to do with drawing a wider audience and increasing the ratings of a failing television event than any artistic principles.

The Coen Brothers's newest and best film, A Serious Man, and Neill Blomkamp's science fiction thriller/morality tale, District 9, provided the only surprises in the Best Picture nominations. However, even with these two films in hand, all of the ten Best Picture nominees are already represented in all the other voting categories from directing, writing, acting and so on.

Could the Oscars have taken this occasion to push forth other more unfamiliar-to-large-audience films like Steve McQueen's Hunger (featuring the inimitable Michael Fassbender from Inglourious Basterds) and James Gray's Two Lovers (an exceptional modern retelling of Dostoevsky's short story, "White Nights")?

The Oscars could have done so, but they played it safe with An Education, which is already represented best in the Best Actress category thanks to a wonderful performance by Carey Mulligan (also seen briefly in Brothers with Natalie Portman). Pixar's Up (also nominated in the Best Animated Feature where it should, but won't, lose to the Fantastic Mr. Fox) slides into the nominee list as recompense for ignoring WALL-E last year.

It seems fair to say that Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds would not have made it into the Best Picture nominees had it not been for the doubling of the slots as it is already spoken for in the Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor categories. Much like Heath Ledger of last year, Christoph Waltz as Col. Landa in Basterds is a guaranteed win, but why the Oscars chose performances like Matt Damon's in Invictus instead of the virtuoso debut of Christian McKay in Me and Orson Welles is disappointing, but certainly not unexpected.

Scalp Basterds and kick it off the probable-winner list, and we come next to Precious and Up in the Air. Though different in narrative content, both films share a similar manipulative technique that makes me think of The Blind Side meets Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream directed by Michael Moore.

Both films are fairly pedantic in pacing, and they're mostly attempts to maneuver the emotions of the viewer towards a particular ideology in the symbol of a "feel-good" movie. They disguise this deceitful ethos by claiming to be "real." Excise the overdone pigfeet and the on-the-nose cleverness of the backpacks, and there's not much in either Precious or Up in the Air, respectively.

What about the fact that Marc Webb pulled off many of the same film gimmicks in 500 Days of Summer that Lee Daniels failed to do in Precious? Or that the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man tackles the same issues as Up in the Air, but remains a film, not a sermon?

That leaves us with James Cameron's Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. Despite the fact that the two directors were previously married, the competition between these two for the Best Picture win is nothing short of a battle. Avatar has the upper hand in terms of audience appeal and box office success, but it's Bigelow's The Hurt Locker that has been garnering the most accolades during awards season.

In The Hurt Locker's unforgettable sniper scene, the sniper's triumph is determined by the visibility and consequent vulnerability of his enemy. Accordingly, Bigelow might as well address James Cameron and his giant smurfs with the preamble: "I see you."

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