Sorry Avatar... you were fun, but not Oscar stuff

I have a rule for stories that teach a moral. Base the moral on principals that actually match the situation, not some fantasy concoction that is contrived to appeal to people's emotions. It is my contention that if the moral's point is really important enough to push that it will stand on its own merits.

Some examples of such morals:

Fatal Attraction: moral - don't have extramarital affairs
Why - movie reason: because the person you have an affair with might be a psychopath and might try to kill yiou
Why - real reason: because you are married, you dumb-ass!

Happy Feet: moral - we should preserve habitat of species like penguins
Why - movie reason: because maybe they do something cool like tap dance
Why - real reason: numerous, but for starters because the ecosystem is complex and if we ruin it so much penguins cannot live in it, who knows what it will do to us

Avatar: moral - we should not destroy nature and should respect the homelands of people we meet
Why - movie reason: because those people might just have a super cool biological ethernet with persisted storage shoved away inside all those trees and plants
Why - real reason: let's start at injustice and then make our way through the same list I used for Happy Feet

Don't get me wrong. I loved the biological neural network, persisted memory concept. That was one of the better science fiction ideas I have seen in a long time. I just hated how contrived the morality of it all was. The storyline of Avatar was incredibly contrived. The writing layered so many "and then..." conitions necessary to carry off the script (I resist saying plot) that it felt very deus ex in the end. All we are waiting for is the mighty power of the word processor to declare victory for our heroes.

Plop this all on top of an incredibly obvious re-hashing of very heavy handed cliche's. The noble savage. The greedy corporation. Hudson's Bay Company meets Jungle Planet X in search of unobtanium!!! The symbolism is layered thicker than cheese on a Godfather's Pizza, so thick that Cameron didn't even bother to give unobtainium a name (FWIW: as per wikipedia, unobtainium is a word used by chemists, physicists and their ilk to refer to something that has properties necessary to accomplish some goal, which might POSSIBLY exist, which we have not established exists, but which we are pretending exists for sake of argument). I refuse to give someone credit for writing a script when they don't even replace the boilerplate text.

I thoroughly enjoyed Avatar (once I got over the motion sickness), and would recommend it as a good way to enjoy an afternoon. The science fiction concepts were cool, the characters were fun, the visuals were astounding and the action was exciting. All that said, though, I just don't feel as if something that contrived, obvious and heavy handed really deserves an Oscar.