It’s a few hours to the Oscars and here’s what seems obvious to me:
The Academy is dominated by actors. It’s largely an actors’ club. And what Avatar says in flashing blue letters a mile high is “All you guys can be replaced by CG.”
Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. Avatar may well clean up the technical awards, but it’s not going to get a sniff at any of the big ones.
Avatar didn’t replace actors with CG, just like movies didn’t replace actors with cellulose. Actors are an integral part of creating the characters of Avatar; the stars wore sophisticated face and body motion-capture arrays so that the virtual characters showed perfect reproductions of their every wrinkled lip and sneer. It’s set designers and location scouts who should be worried.