Why Avatar did not win Best Picture

I finally saw Avatar last weekend, and that is why this is not a very timely subject. If I would have seen Avatar in the theaters I would have titled this "Why Avatar will not win Best Picture."

BIG DISCLAIMER: Of the 50 award winning films for best picter since 1960, I have seen just 12. That's 24%, not a lot. I have seen just 52 of the ~250 nominated films, verifying that I have seen about 20% of the best films of the past 50 years. This also discounts my ability as a film critic, so don't take this as some professional opinion, it's just my uninformed opinion.
Like I was saying, Avatar was never in position to win Best picture. I liked the movie, I liked the premise, the politicalization of the film, cinematography, whatever, it was a good movie. As I left the theater, though, I realized that I had seen this movie before. In fact, the movie that Avatar mirrors won the Academy Award for best picture back in 1990-Dances With Wolves. Let's compare the two


Avatar
-Man goes to a faraway planet to take a job
-Man befriends the native people, is loved by them and pairs off with one of them
-The people the man works for decide to destroy the natives' home and the man is seen as having betrayed his own people
-Man leads redemption attack against his people and wins
-Lives forever as leader of the natives on the faraway planet





Dances With Wolves
-Man is stationed in the middle of nowhere as a fort for the Union
-Man is lonely, befriends the natives, becomes one of them and pairs off with one of them
-While he is living with them the Union comes to his fort and expand operations; in a return visit he is taken prisoner
-Natives attack the Union wagon transporting the man and free him
-Lives on the run because, as we know, the natives got kicked around for years until we found the most desolate parts of the nation to send them there to build casinos.

Another movie built on this same premise wasn't even nominated for Best Picture (The Last Samurai, 2003), but thanks to James Cameron, blue people and not hiring Tom Cruise, Avatar was nominated. I actually like The Last Samurai better than Avatar, and I liked DWW better than the both of them. You know why? For the same reason DWW won and Avatar did not- the guy you root for--the one who is superiorly overmatched by the antagonist--loses. Think DWW. Think Rocky. If your hero loses, yet lives, and you leave the theater in tears, then you've really done something there, and that's what we're talking about in in those two examples. With Avatar, though, the impropable had to happen in order to make the movie worth it, because if the blue people would have lost, I probably would have thought, "Well, they didn't really have a chance because you don't mess with Stephen Lang, I mean, did you see him as Stonewall Jackson in Gods and Generals?" This was a fantasy movie, and fantasy doesn't win unless it features hairy feet and a Dick Cheney look-alike (See LOTR-2003). So that's my reason. It was based on an old theme but adjusted for the audience to see the good guys win even though they had absolutely no chance.