Why Avatar: The Way Of Water Will Win Best Picture
'Tis t-minus 10 days until the Oscars, and for the second consecutive year-- but just the third time ever! -- no less than 10 films are ramping up their campaigns in a last-minute push for the top prize of them all, Best Picture. The biggest award has the potential to be either one of the most anticlimactic or most surprising result in recent years. The former is true, because one film has won the vast majority of the top prizes on the awards circuit thus far, the buzzy Everything Everywhere All At Once. However, not only would the multiverse comedy with a big heart and primarily Asian cast be a wildly abnormal winner, few if any other top contenders are traditional 'Oscar bait,' and none are without its detractor.
Those facts, as well as the Oscars' less predictable preferential voting system means that no nominee can truly be counted out of the race. Spotlight's and Moonlight's back-to-back upsets in 2016 and 2017, Parasite's stunner in 2020, and CODA's late surge last year all taught us to expect the unexpected, so we're here to give fans of all 10 nominees reason to believe on Sunday the 12th.
To kick off this series, I'm ironically starting with the one nominee I am yet to actually watch. It's also one of the longer shots to win, and yet perhaps the biggest and most recognizable of all nominees: James Cameron's Avatar: The Way Of Water.
Though you could be forgiven for forgetting there was a sequel to Avatar that came out in the last year, or especially for forgetting just how long it had been since the first movie came out, you would have to be living under a rock to have not heard of any Avatar movie at all. A sequel to the 2009 original, The Way Of Water nearly matches the real-world time elapse, picking up 16 years from where the original Avatar ended. It features main characters Jake Sully and Neytiri helping their Na'vi tribe and seeking refuge with another tribe within the fictional world of Pandora, which has once again come under human threat. The cast added some big names that didn't feature in the first film, too, with the likes of Kate Winslet, Edie Falco and Jermaine Clement, among others, all coming aboard.
It's hard to argue The Way Of Water was either as acclaimed or culturally impactful as 2009's Avatar was; where the original was lauded for its groundbreaking technology and visual effects along with its storyline, reviews were more mixed this time on the plot and direction of the film this time around. The technical achievement was once again universally renowned, but wasn't exactly new in 2022 the way it was nearly fourteen years ago. Still, a whole lot of people were excited to see it, which is not insignificant for its contender credentials: grossing about $600 million, The Way Of Water was the second-best performer at the box office out of all nominees, and the distance between second and third was a whole lot steeper than between first and second. In a very competitive year, with the Academy's ranked-choice voting method (you're going to hear me make this point a lot during this series), that sort of mass appeal could make it a spoiler. Ever since the pandemic, movie fans and critics have seemed to place an even greater premium on 'movie magic'; if every voter has a neutral-positive view of Avatar due to its movie magic, it may pop up in the Top 3 or Top 4 of enough ballots to survive cuts in the voting rounds.
Additionally, many might argue "if the original, groundbreaking Avatar didn't win Best Picture, there's no way its less-watched, less-acclaimed sequel will." However, I would argue The Way Of Water's odds are boosted by the fact that its predecessor didn't win. There's unlikely to be 'Avatar fatigue' among voters given that it didn't actually win any major Oscars with its original, and so many years have passed between movies 1 and 2. Furthermore, in the eyes of many, Avatar was snubbed back at the 2010 ceremony; voters may see this as a chance to finally rectify that snub. Was The Revenant Leonardo DiCaprio's best acting job? Or Joker Joaquin Phoenix's? Was The Shape Of Water Guillermo del Toro's best film? The answer is a resounding No to all of the above; but the huge push for each to win Best Actor or Picture/Director for those movies was because of the overwhelming sentiment that an award was long overdue. I don't know how many 'friends' the infamously prickly James Cameron has in the Academy, but he's certain to at least have many admirers.
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