Congratulations! Monday, March 8, 2010

Hey, that was great. A dose of gender parity was dished out. It was--honestly--really satisfying to see Jim Cameron's smug, techojock grin wiped from his face, and to see Katherine Bigelow fumble happily through her two acceptance speeches. The better movie won.

So, just maybe Rex Reed, Anthony Lane, Grandma, Uncle Sam and Che Guevera can finally relax and actually talk about these movies as if they were fictional things? Now that the movie whose budget could have gone to feed an African refugee camp won out over the movie that could have gone to feed a small African country? Because the movie which was explicitly a set of anti-militaristic cliches--and which was not, in fact, so anti-war after all--had as its chief advantage the fact that no one could ever, ever mistake it for reality. Which makes Avatar--and a lot of other science fiction-- less a fashion accessory for the epistemologically challenged and more like something you can actually talk about at the end of the day.

Not that I'm saying The Hurt Locker didn't have good special effects. I'm just saying, it'll be a great day when a woman can win an Oscar for a real, grown-up movie like this: