Avatar Doesn't Win Best Picture

I was surprised that Avatar didn't win. The film was essentially the Hollywood worldview crammed into two and a half hours and combined with good CGI. It was about a human who allies with peaceful alien natives and fights off an evil human corporation and miliary to protect them. It was almost as if the writers had went to TVTropes.org, found all of the tropes they could use to promote their anti-white, anti-male, anti-Western, anti-capitalist, environut views, and blended them into a script.

The entire thing was supposed to be an allegory for the Western treatment of various "natives." White people find a verdant paradise. White people move in. White people defile the paradise. White people steal the resources. White people kill the natives. Only this time, the natives fight back and defeat the evil white people! I wonder when Hollywood will get around to making an allegory showing how the blacks who inherited the prosperous lands of Rhodesia, South Africa, Haiti, and Detroit proceeded to wreck them. Or an allegory about the epidemic of black on white crime, in particular black on white rape. Or make an allegory showing the "noble" savages as, well, savages, which is what many "native" people throughout history were. Maybe they could show that "native" people aren't always environmentally-friendly, too.

In addition to being anti-white, it was anti-male (anti-white films tend to be - those two views frequently go together in Hollywood). While the good humans and the Navri included both males and females, the bad guys were entirely male from the leaders to the common soldiers. There was only one female bad guy, Michelle Rodriguez's character (an action girl, like most of the characters she plays), but she ended up helping the good guys. So the only good (morally) soldier was a woman and vice versa. Did a feminist write the script? Actually, this is pretty common, as in most movies the good guys will be diverse while the bad guys will be all men (usually all or mostly white, too). I was just surprised that considering that women in the world's militaries are very common even today, it was odd that they were basically nonexistant in the military in a movie set in the 22nd century, when women are supposed to be even more "equal." I guess we know Hollywood's idea of equality now. (I'll be writing a more general blog post about this trope sometime in the near future.)

The sad thing about the movie was that so many white men were enamored with the special effects and topless blue alien women that they were oblivious to the message directed at them: you are evil. Some liberal men undoubtedly saw the message, but agreed with it. I guess the 13 years of multicultural, feminist brainwashing (17 years for university students) must be pretty effective.

Even libertarians are buying into the Avatar-worship - Lew Rockwell is complaining that The Hurt Locker won and there were plenty of posts on the LewRockwell.com blog when Avatar came out praising it and its message.

One more thing: Spearhead ran an article in January critical of Avatar and its themes. The authors views are similar to mine, but though the article goes into much more depth: check it out here. It's a pretty good article.

Why there are fewer female speaking roles

Over at Feministe, a couple days ago Jill posted (without comment) part of an article from the LA Times, which says that despite making up half the population, only 29.9% of movie speaking roles are (at least in the top 100 grossing films of 2007). The reason was pretty obvious to me: most of the bad guys in movies are men. While the good guys usually consist of men and women, most villains are male, almost all of their lieutenants are male, and virtually every mook/guard/redshirt is male.

Avatar is an example of this. While there were male and female protagonists, all of the antagonists at every level were male.

JJ Abram's Star Trek is another example. In Starfleet (the good guys), there were both men and women present - on the USS Kelvin, at Starfleet Academy, and on the USS Enterprise. Indeed, it looked like the producers and casting directors had gone out of their way to make the crews seem half-male, half-female.

The villainous Romulans, in contrast, were all male. Lucia Rijker (known for playing a boxer in Million Dollar Baby was supposed to play a female Romulan, but I didn't see her. Anyways, there was no way it could have been accidental that the good guys were mixed male-female and the bad guys all male.

Now, if the good guys are male and female and the bad guys are male, it follows that there will be more men with speaking roles than women. Of course, if films started showing more "bad girls," feminists would probably complain that the film industry is "promoting violence against women."