Merit

So when I heard that Hurt Locker beat out Avatar for both Best Director and Best Picture, I felt slightly validated in my decision to simply write off the Academy and their rewards entirely. I have many issues with the Oscars, but after Slumdog Millionaire won eight awards last year, I simply could not bring myself to accept their validation anymore. Now don't get me wrong, Slumdog Millionaire is an amazing film deserving massive amounts of praise, but eight awards?

This brought me to a thought though about merit. The worth of something, how do you judge it? Hurt Locker cost eleven million dollars to make, Avatar cost over two hundred million, so does that mean Hurt Locker should get more recognition because it came from a smaller budget? Hurt locker came and went with twenty-one million dollars gross, Avatar has made over four billion, does Avatar get the praise due to making more profit per cost?

How do we judge things? Hurt Locker is a visceral realistic tale of a Military Bomb Squad unit in Iraq, Avatar is a science fiction film about dominance of culture and environment taking place on another world... Which is the better story? The one that makes you feel the reality of the world in specific, or the one that makes you think more broadly about it?

How do you put merit to something that has no real world application beyond entertainment? I loved a movie you hated, that person adored a movie that was critically panned. A movie comes and goes without a word, and five years later it's suddenly a cult classic. Where do we draw the line of good and better in something that's a personal experience to us all?

The idea of judging an idea... It seems strange to even me, someone who writes movie reviews. I tell people what movies I thought were good, which ones I thought were terrible. All my opinions in my reviews are simply a reflection of myself. All my ideas of what makes good entertainment are completely lost on the people who like something else.

And yet each year the Academy Awards come on, some few people tell us what movies were the best, who are they? Why do they get to decide that, which movie comes out on top, which one was simply good enough for a mention...

The Razzies, another award show held usually about a week before the Academy Awards gives out the awards for the worst films. They will juddge a piece of entertainment not on it's accolades, but on it's failures. Lambasting the least entertaining films, according to them, and handing out an award for it.

Now I'm not saying that you cannot judge art, nor am I saying you shouldn't. I'm saying we all have opinions of one pieve of entertainment's worth, it's merit... And if I were on the Academy, Avatar would have won Best Picture...