I know it's a lot to ask, but I would like the Academy to vote for the best movie, not the movie of the moment.
If you have a look at movies that are now regarded as amongst the greatest of all time, many have lost Oscars to movies that are now otherwise forgotten. Obviously it's not easy for individuals to work out which movies will be remembered (speaking for myself, I would never have guessed that The Godfather, Kill Bill, Dr. Strangelove or Star Wars were destined for such success) but surely a group could get it right.
Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon lost to How Green Was My Valley; The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction lost to Forrest Gump. There's also an issue of genres: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly failed to receive a nomination, which was probably not helped by its being a Western; Terminator 2 and Die Hard, regarded as two of the better action movies of the last 30 years, both missed out as well. It is also rare for comedies to win, or even be nominated, Shakespeare In Love being one of the rare recent exceptions.
Pressure often seems to work. Titanic is widely slated, but had a huge box office taking and massive publicity campaign, so emerged with the prize. Going back a few years, Sunset Boulevard paints the film industry in a bad light and failed to win; and Citizen Kane was probably not helped by being a parody of one of the richest and most powerful men of its day.
Movies that win also tend to be longer than your average flick. And, despite theoretically being open to movies from anywhere in the world, foreign films seem to be consigned to the Best Foreign Language category, regardless of quality. Amelie, Seven Samurai and City of God are three movies that are highly regarded by the critics but didn't get nominated for Best Picture, though Amelie did at least have the consolation of winning the award for Best Foreign Language Film.
In fact, it's a curious combination of snobbery and populism, to disregard foreign films and art house films almost entirely, but also to disregard those from unfashionable genres.
Avatar is the movie of the moment. It has been nominated for numerous Oscars, and its special effects are regarded by contemporary cinema fans as outstanding – as have those of several other movies, such as The Jazz Singer and Terminator 2. But those movies are not remembered now for their animation, but for their plots and storyline, and on these counts Avatar fails miserably. There is the stereotypical good and evil, the trite storyline, the (American) outsider going in and making things better for the local inhabitants. Above all, for all the 3-D technology used, the characters are as two-dimensional as ever, and could have been lifted from any one of fifty movies that were released last year.
This is not a movie that will be remembered as one of the greatest ever. It will probably figure largely in lists of films that employed groundbreaking technology, but that's all that film historians will remember it for. I hope that the Academy recognises this.
On a final note, I'd like to make a suggestion to all my devoted readers, especially those who haven't seen or heard of all of the above movies: next time you're hiring videos, bypass the new releases and the mindless comedies, and head for the foreign films and the classics. You may just be pleasantly surprised.