Avatar and The Hurt Locker Lead Oscar Nominations
With nine nominations each, The Hurt Locker and Avatar are poised to run away with many of the major Academy Awards.
For the first time since 1943, there are 10 films nominated for Best Picture – during the previous 65 years, there have only been 5 films nominated for the honor on a yearly basis. In addition to Avatar and The Hurt Locker, these films were also nominated for Best Picture: District 9; Up; Inglourious Basterds; The Blind Side; Up in The Air; A Serious Man; An Education, and Precious.
At this point, most of the popular sentiment lies with Avatar, a film that James Cameron has pushed to heights that exceed even Titanic, his previous number one box office juggernaut. Avatar offers a bit of everything for movie fans, from its groundbreaking special effects to a poignant-if-all-too-familiar story of greed at odds with natural beauty and a better humanity.
In one of the more interesting side stories to recent Oscar Nights, James Cameron and his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow are competing head-to-head for Best Director honors. And their films, Avatar and The Hurt Locker, respectively, are the clear leaders in overall nominations and expected to do extremely well on Oscar Night. Bigelow is only the 4th woman to ever be nominated for a Best Director honor and she could very well be the first to win the award. "It's a huge, huge compliment to the entire cast and crew," she said. "It was a very difficult shoot of heat and sun and windstorms and sandstorms and they had to unite crew from Lebanon and Israel."