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Celebrate Sci-Fi Supremacy With Wired.com's Oscar Picks

Will Avatar finally tear down the wall between sci-fi and Oscar cachet Sunday night at the Academy Awards? If it doesn’t, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences loses what’s left of its credibility faster than a Na’vi can kill a colonizer. The list of sci-fi classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star […]
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Image courtesy Art Streiber

Will Avatar finally tear down the wall between sci-fi and Oscar cachet Sunday night at the Academy Awards? If it doesn't, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences loses what's left of its credibility faster than a Na'vi can kill a colonizer.

The list of sci-fi classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars that have been dissed for Best Picture is excruciating to read. But with Avatar, James Cameron has revitalized the film industry and can't be ignored. Avatar racked up nine nominations, but if the Oscars were about influence and innovation, this party would already be over.

Below are sci-fi artists (and a few other noteworthy contenders) that deserve Oscars for their work in 2009, whether nominated or not. These talents represent the future of cinema today: Eye-popping, brainy and pretty damn lucrative. Got your own winners? Cast your votes in the comments section below.

Best Director: James Cameron, Avatar

In a perfect world, James Cameron would have been nominated for the first two Terminator films. He finally cashed in with a lesser film in Titanic, in which a flimsy period drama was swallowed up by groundbreaking FX. While the directors Cameron is up against this year are all talented, they'd likely be blown away by Avatar's sheer scale. Merely inventing the camera Cameron used for his 3-D sci-fi epic might drive some of them crazy – much less using it to craft the highest-grossing film of all time.

Cameron's cautionary tale of resource wars and indigenous revolt, years in the making, proved utterly topical. It's also stunning to watch. The only thing standing in Cameron's way is heresy.

Image courtesy Focus Features

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Focus

Best Animated Film: Coraline

Henry Selick's stop-motion, 3-D masterpiece of the domestic uncanny wasn't as accessible or optimistic as Pixar's probable Oscar-winner Up, but it was easily the more arresting film. And while the rampant quirk of Wes Anderson's underrated The Fantastic Mr. Fox scored plenty of style points, Coraline had dark style to spare, especially in its bright spots. Plus, if this award is truly about cool, who's cooler than Neil Gaiman? We're just saying.

"We’re so proud of it," Gaiman told Wired.com in 2009, speaking of the film based on his award-winning novella of the same name. "If it wasn’t for the Jonas Brothers spoiling our mojo, we might have been the highest-grossing stop-motion movie ever made. When their film came out, Coraline was pulled from some theaters to make space. Two weeks later, when the Jonas Brothers film made no money, we got put back into more."

Actually, Coraline should win an Oscar for that reason alone.

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Image courtesy Dimension Films

Best Actor: Viggo Mortensen, The Road, and Sam Rockwell, Moon (tie)

The last time the Academy Awards made sense was in 2003, when Peter Jackson's CGI-heavy The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King set off Avatar-like industry quakes of its own. Watching Jackson and crew sweep up Oscars all night made for boring TV, but it still made sense.

Viggo Mortensen (pictured above) was the King in question then, but his acting chops have only gotten grittier since, in subsequent films like David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises and A History of Violence. As for The Road, this dystopian nightmare adapted by director John Hillcoat from Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed novel was so hard to watch that it only landed on a comparative handful of screens. Still, Mortensen gave the film gravitas and tenderness, hard to do in a post-apocalyptic dead zone of cannibals, rapists and worse.

In Moon, Sam Rockwell (pictured below) faced a similarly forbidding environment: an empty lunar mining base that provides the perfect setting for the movie's mind games.

Director Duncan Jones labeled Rockwell's performance genius. "I really don't think there is anyone else that I could have done this with," Jones told Wired.com.

Neither Mortensen nor Rockwell were nominated for their commanding performances.

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Image courtesy Magnolia Pictures

Best Documentary: Food, Inc.

Food, Inc., Robert Kenner and Elise Pearlstein's exploration of the most seemingly mundane of worlds, stood out like a sore carnivore in 2009. And it was much scarier than its fictional analogue Soylent Green.

The difference? In Food, Inc., people don't eat people. Food eats people.

Most Americans think their grub comes from a supermarket, and that convenient if unhealthy distance ignores our overstressed food industry's increasing stomachaches. From E. coli outbreaks to vanishing honeybees and boring old obesity, our factory feeding could be killing us. If you look at a hamburger the same way after watching Food, Inc., you're a chicken. On steroids.

Original Score: Alexandre Desplat, The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Wes Anderson has always leaned heavily on music, original and otherwise, for his quirky tales of interpersonal tangles. When it comes to pop music, he's smashed up Rushmore with The Who and set fire to The Fantastic Mr. Fox with The Rolling Stones "Street Fighting Man."

For The Fantastic Mr. Fox, composer Alexandre Desplat avoided blockbuster swells of strings and horns. Instead, he went lo-fi with banjos, recorders, harps and other minimalist instruments that perfectly underscored Anderson's lightly bouncing comedy of animals and the farmers they harass. Too often, swollen scores tend to swallow their films by drenching their audiences in condescension. Refreshingly, Desplat's score hovered above and beneath The Fantastic Mr. Fox while clearing space for deeper thought.

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Art Direction: Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer, Sherlock Holmes

Quite simply the year's most ruggedly gorgeous period piece, Guy Ritchie's design team surrounded Robert Downey Jr. with sumptuous Victorian-era finery juxtaposed with gritty urban details that perfectly set the tone for this kick-ass excursion led by London's most famous detective.

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Image courtesy Summit Entertainment

Courtesy of Summit Entertainment

Cinematography: Barry Ackroyd, The Hurt Locker

While the other entries look great, director Kathryn Bigelow's director of photography goes beyond pretty pictures: Using handheld cameras, Ackroyd seemingly puts viewers directly into the skin of the film's embattled adrenaline junkies. As a result, Hurt Locker bristles with more visceral energy than any other movie released in 2009.

Adapted Screenplay: Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, District 9

Its dialogue is not as sharp as probable winner Up in the Air but District 9 boasts the most interesting concept of all the 2010 contenders. Director/co-writer Blomkamp jumps a mighty high hurdle by telling a fresh story within the parameters of the superfamiliar "aliens attack" genre.

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Original Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

Dialogue, not bullets, provides the firepower for Quentin Tarantino's outlandish World War II revenge fantasy. Sure-to-win Best Supporting Actor nominee Christoph Waltz (pictured) barely does anything more physical than puff a pipe or eat strudel: His mesmerizing performance as a shrewd Gestapo chief draws almost entirely on the use and abuse of language.

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Best Picture: Avatar

So-called "small" movies have rightfully earned a place at the Oscar table recently, but the very big Avatar deserves the top prize this year. Why? Huge concept, precise execution. The story itself has been told in different ways dozens of times before. But Cameron invented a potentially revolutionary arsenel of image-making tools. Yoking a solid-enough narrative to a fantastically realized alternate world anchored in strong motion-capture performances, Avatar rules as the decade's single most significant picture.

In any other year, The Hurt Locker's hypertense dramatics would likely surpass all comers, but neither Bigelow's Iraq War thriller nor any of the other well-crafted entries approach the watershed achievements embodied in Avatar.

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Additional reporting by Hugh Hart and Lewis Wallace.

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