Jim Cameron Trashes The Oscars

If you’ve thought that the ‘Oscars’ is a ceremony increasingly existing within it’s own highfalutin bubble, you’re probably in agreement with Jim Cameron, director of great movies like The Terminator and True Lies.  Here is what he said this week;

“There have been a few times throughout the history of the Oscars where a wildly popular film was well-received, but your typical year the Academy takes the position of: ‘It is our patrician duty to tell the great unwashed what they should be watching,’ and they don’t reward the films that people really want to see—that they’re paying money to go see—and they’re telling them, ‘Yeah, you think you like that, but what you should be liking is this.’ And as long as the Academy sees that as their duty, don’t expect high ratings. Expect a good show, and do that duty, but don’t whine about your ratings. Titanic was a very unusual case. I’m not saying it’s a better film than films before or after, or it was necessarily a better year in general, but it was a film that made a boatload of money and got a lot of nominations. The next time we see that, we’ll see ratings go up. It’s that simple.”

This reminds me on Steven E. De Souza’s commentary on the Die Hard DVD.  He said that film snobs had to begrudgingly concede that the movie was a masterwork of fictional entertainment… whilst being a violent action movie.  A bitter pill for them to swallow.