The nominations for the 2023 Academy Awards were announced early Tuesday morning.
Best in class Netflix’s German war movie “All Quiet on the Western Front” and the Irish dark comedy “The Banshees of Inisherin” with 9 and “Elvis” with 8
My husband and I always take time in each winner to see the potential nominees and predict the winners, often unsuccessfully.
This year we have not seen the Box office triumph: “Everything Everywhere All at Once” which led the pack with 11 nominations“To but did see “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and “Avatar: The Way of Water” which landed 6, 5 and 4, respectively.
We enjoyed Tom Cruise who plays Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun. I did not think he’d earn an Oscar nomination for playing Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in a sequel to an action movie made 36 years ago. But he did pick up a nomination for producing “Top Gun: Maverick,” which was recognized for best picture.
We were very interested in seeing and comparing Black Panther and Avatar as African American contenders. These are two of the season’s hottest ticket franchise blockbusters, each utilize the conflict between indigenous cultures and their colonizers as a source of thematic and engaging storytelling.
However, the stories of both Wakanda and Pandora depict vastly different expressions of how indigenous people fight and overcome the menace of colonialism.
Black Panther is set in a hyper futuristic nation built on an embraced African cultural heritage.
Wakanda is prosperous and isspared from colonization to become a global superpower. This allows Wakanda’s its freedom from colonist oppression that the rest of the African continent suffered from. Wakanda is a wholly independent nation avoiding the march of colonial history, and shows the evils and long-lasting societal effects of colonization, and how inaction perpetuates it.
However, it is not using strength to right racial injustices felt throughout the rest of the world. Black Panther celebrates indigenous cultures and gives its people strength, visibility and agency in exploring the innate evils of historical colonization.
Avatar, on the other hand, use a more traditionalist look at indigenous people and colonialism as a source of melodrama. It approaches the cultures and experiences of real-world indigenous peoples, with Pandora and its native Na’vi representing an amalgamation of many indigenous cultures across the globe.
Pandora and the Na’vi are fantastically alien in their design. These alien species become racial other, in a science fiction genre and embody the dignity of indigenous peoples not as their own antonymous societies, but as they have been represented through colonialist history.
They are victims always fighting for their own survival and seldom allowed to inhabit their own stories that don’t echo colonist history. There is the promise of the fight against colonizers to be the only fight worth fighting and the only story worth telling.
Given all of this, Avatar is simply a gorgeous film which we both enjoyed watching in its luscious underwater cinematography.
