Sharing my love of all things Oscar. I see all the movies with nominations so you don't have to - and I do my best to research and help pick the winners. Subscribe, share your comments, and feel free to share with others. Follow me on Twitter @JodiBee.
Best Achievement in Visual Effects: Joe Letteri, Richard Baneham, Eric Saindon, Daniel Barrett
Best Achievement in Costume Design: Deborah L. Scott
In the 3rd installment of the Avatar story, Jake and his Navi family are still being hunted by the military and now they have discovered a new enemy, the Ash tribe who are hungry for power and will do anything to obtain it. James Cameron again takes us to a magnificent place where the spiritual and the ecological meet. The film does its best to teach simple values and while the tropes of good and evil may be overly binary in the Avatar universe, I still find the movies both exciting and entertaining. Visually, they are incomparably stunning - that goes for all of the technical categories, the costumes, the makeup and hairstyling, the visual effects, the production design, the sound design; there isn’t a detail in this world that isn’t both bespoke and utterly detailed.
This isn’t a film that you mustn’t miss. It’s not likely to win either one of the awards for which it is nominated. But I enjoyed it and if you’re a fan of this genre, you will too.
Jake Sully is back in this beautiful sequel to the original Avatar film. He has married Neytiri, and together they have 4 Na'vi children and one semi-adopted human child (known as Spider). Jake serves as the chief of the Omatikaya clan in the forests of Pandora. Though killed in battle in the first movie, Colonel Miles Quaritch and others are back and reincarnated as Na'vi avatars who have had the human soldiers' memories implanted in their brains, and they are ready for another fight. Driven by revenge and a need to take over Pandora's resources, the members of the "RDA" are eager to kill Jake and his family. They manage to kidnap Spider and bring him back to the military ship to interrogate him and hopefully turn his allegiance to the humans.
The Sully clan determines that their presence among the forest Na'vi is putting the entire community in danger so they flee and ask for refuge among the Metkayina clan who live by and commune with the ocean. Reluctant to bring danger into their community, the tribe ultimately welcomes the family and teaches them how to live among their people.
But the RDA soldiers are not going to give up. They chase the family and hunt the Tulkun whale-like creatures who live in spiritual harmony with the Na'vi tribe as a means of drawing Jake Sully out to kill him. All this for both profit and revenge, again kidnapping Sully's children and threatening the peaceful existence of the clan. Though I won't offer any spoilers, part 3 of this 5-part saga is well set up with this story, both for characters who will want revenge and for the fate of Pandora and its Na'vi inhabitants.
As expected, Avatar: The Way of Water has swept the technical categories for nominations. As the first one was, this film is visually and audibly stunning (I even paid extra for the 3D experience, and it was worth it). The story is emotional and compelling, and it delivers on the big budget epic Hollywood experience that only James Cameron can produce. Is it a must-see film? Not really. If you see it (and you saw the first one and liked it) will you love it? Absolutely.
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