To many out there, arguing that Avatar: The Way of Water should win best picture is akin to defending Charles Manson in court. But someone has to do it. And my argument hinges on that word “best”. How do we measure what the “best” picture is? Best at what? Quality is subjective, and as we have seen time and time again, the subjective opinion of the sum total of academy voters when it comes to this category is very often terrible: Argo? Crash? Driving Miss Daisy? Shakespeare in Love? Please.
This is not to say we should just stick to objective measurements, otherwise it would just be the highest-grossing movie that wins every year and there’d be no point to awards season. Although by such measures, The Way of Water would win hands down: $2.2bn and counting. As usual, the doubters were lined up waiting for James Cameron’s latest giant leap to fail, and as usual, it didn’t. You can sucker a lot of people into seeing a movie in its first week (see the recent Ant-Man 3, or rather don’t – its US box office plummeted 69% in its second week), but you can’t fool half the world into going to see a three-hour movie, some of them multiple times. Critics enjoyed panning The Way of Water for its hokeyness, its length, its garishness, its heavy-handedness, etc, etc. But they clearly missed something that regular moviegoers connected with.
