Yes, Avatar was amazing. Awe-inspiring. I sat rapt for two and a half hours, my 3D glasses on, soaking up this magical universe Jim Cameron conjured. At moments I forgot I had glasses on, so immersive was Cameron’s vision, so all-inclusive and mesmerizing. Watching Avatar was a movie-going experience unlike any I can remember, and not since Jurassic Park (maybe Lord of the Rings?) can I remember such a fantastic vision so completely delivering on its premise.

As such, Avatar should win every single technical award that exists. From the sound to the computer-graphics, everything about this fake world felt tangible, lived-in, and complete.

But let’s be honest: this movie has no business winning Best Picture. All of the magic of Avatar was contained in its visual presentation. The script left more than a little bit to be desired. In many ways, it was flat-out awful.

Maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe that word “Picture” allows wiggle room for a strictly visual experience to make off with the award. But I don’t think so.  If we look at all ten films nominated for Best Picture (don’t get me started on that debacle), it appears that almost half have almost no chance whatsoever of winning (An Education, A Serious Man, The Blind Side, and District 9).

There are, in fact, only four worthy candidates. I’d include Precious, but the vibe I get is that its triumph comes more in performance and direction than overall presentation. I also see no reason to include Inglourious Basterds, for reasons I’ve previously mentioned in this space*.

As for the contenders…

Up has the animated feature stigma working against it, so it, too, probably has no chance. But it was the most heartfelt and affecting movie I saw last year, for large stretches a perfect meditation on life and love and loss*. I’d lobby harder, but many of the reasons I’m against awarding Avatar Best Picture also apply to Up, and so I must allow its being cast aside. It will win Best Animated Feature (punking Wes Anderson in the process, who got screwed in a couple ways by the Academy this year), and that suffices.

So now down to three: Avatar, The Hurt Locker, and Up In The Air. One is a potent portrayal of warfare released as our nation remains enmeshed in two foreign entanglements. Another is a potent portrayal of a corporate Grim Reaper released amidst the havoc wreaked by our flailing economy. The other is a movie about blue cat people on a distant planet who fly dragons and use slings, spears, and bows and arrows to defeat mechanized artillery and hundred-ton gunships.

Which seems more important?

The Hurt Locker enters the psyche of a combatant in a foreign war. It paints a portrait of the soldier’s mentality, and director Kathryn Bigelow presents the traumatic stress a soldier endures by never letting up, by ratcheting things so tight throughout, and delivering her movie’s violence in a such a random way, that afterward I felt a little shaky and a little unsound. No one can know what a soldier goes through but another soldier, but Bigelow did everything in her power to give us war and its after-effects, to bring viewers one small step closer to understanding the human toll these last eight years have taken on America’s best and brightest.

Up in the Air deals with warfare, too, the war companies wage against the unforgiving economy. George Clooney flies from city to city and informs people he does not know that their services are no longer necessary for a company too weak-willed to do the dirty work itself. He leads a solitary existence and deals with human beings at their worst emotional bottom on a daily basis. And he loves it, right up until a young shark shows up with a better system that runs the risk of phasing him out. Throughout the film, interviews with real people who have been fired or laid off pepper the action and add a human element to the proceedings that affects anyone who has struggled to maintain a livelihood, and their sanity, these last three years.

Avatar, conversely, can never, ever, not in a million years, hope to have anything relevant to say about humanity or who we are as Americans. Cameron can have pretensions towards some vague pro-environmental agenda, but his movie’s script is hog-swallow, dog shit, trite, obvious, pat, easy, ultimately nothing more than a series of events allowing him to showcase his next cool new gizmo. Large portions of it don’t make any sense (Why do cat people have sex like regular people? Why was it cool for them to defile the God Tree or whatever that was by fucking on it? How is it possible for a human in costume to become the Greatest of the Cat People while still in costume?). Avatar looks incredible through 3D glasses, but it sounds brain-dead when script details are discussed.

And there’s a precedent here. Star Wars didn’t win Best Picture in 1978: Annie Hall did (Star Wars did, however, win every major costume, design, and effects award). Jurassic Park wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture in 1993 (Schindler’s List won), but it did win all sound and effects awards. It wasn’t until the third Lord of the Rings film that the filmmakers won a bevy of awards for their fantastic vision.

That said, there is a different precedent involving Cameron: his last film, Titanic, won Best Picture and Director as well as all technical awards.  But that was one time, and during that moment the Academy anointed Cameron the visionary director of the age. Is it necessary to anoint him so again? For a movie that has nothing – repeat: nothing – to do with anything real? In our current age?

Please, no. Come on, guys. We’re better than this. Give it to a movie about something. Up In The Air or The Hurt Locker. We can do this, I promise. And not only that, but we kind of need to. Now is as good a time as any for the power of humanity to once again be asserted, no matter how cool Jimmy Cameron’s latest flick looks.