The nominations for the BAFTA awards were announced this morning, and to no real surprise Avatar has been nominated in a grand total of eight categories including Best Film (up against ‘An Education’ ‘The Hurt Locker’ ‘Precious’ and ‘Up In The Air’), Best Director, Best Music and Best Sound, as well as nominations for Cinematography, Editing, Production Design, and Special Visual Effects.
Also up for eight awards (the highest number of nominations this year) are Kathryn Bigelow’s war thriller, ‘The Hurt Locker’ and British coming of age movie ‘An Education.’
However Avatar is generally regarded as the favourite to win most of its categories, and has already won two Golden Globes for Best Film and Best Director, not to mention the seven Critics’ Awards it has already received and the five Guild awards that are still pending, as are the 11 other awards its stands to gain from the Visual Effects Society.
Clearly Avatar has already earned its place in movie history; it over took ‘The Lord Of The Rings: The Return of The King’ as the 2nd highest grossing film of all time only one day after surpassing ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest’ as the 3rd highest grossing film ever; and writer/director James Cameron thinks “it’s just a matter of time” before it over takes ‘Titanic’ as the biggest film in history, and current box office trends point to him being right on all counts.
So now it’s up to the industry members to vote and decide just how many of those prestigious awards will go to Avatar, or which underdogs will cause a surprise hit (maybe ‘District 9’, ‘The Lovely Bones’, or even ‘Shifty’ will steal the show) at the award ceremony on the 21st Feb.
