I was excited to see the nomination list for the Golden Globes. Although seen as a “pre-Oscar,” and thus minor, awards ceremony by most, this year, the 67th, would leave the Academy Awards up in the air (bad pun). The nominations are all over the place, with numerous nominations for the same actor or actress in different categories entirely, and at least one nomination for most of the decent films of 2009 (with only a few debatable omissions: Watchmen, Star Trek).

Awards night comes and goes. There are some predicted wins, such as Christoph Waltz’s multilingual tour-de-force as Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds and Mo’Nique’s horror-villain of a … mother … in Precious. Jeff Bridges won what was probably a well-deserved Best Actor-Drama for a movie no one’s seen yet, and The Hangover’s cheap and quotable laughs propelled it over more substantial films. TV gave props to new shows such as Glee, while old stand-bys won elsewhere.

But what brought down the walls were the two wins for Avatar. Best Drama? Best Director for James Cameron?

This is what we get. Back in 1997, we told James Cameron that we didn’t want well-crafted, groundbreaking action films from him. Films like Aliens, Terminator, The Abyss or even True Lies and its action-comedy mashup. But no: he pulled multi-million dollar wool over our collective sheep’s eyes and coaxed mediocre acting out of a melodramatic clichéd mess of a story to break box-office records and snag awards. That travesty was the cultural phenomenon of Titanic. He won, we lost. The preteen girls got over Leo DiCaprio and shunted him to Scorcese. And great films like Good Will Hunting and L.A. Confidential missed out. Guess which films are still influential, modern classics? Who the hell still watches Titanic?

Well, no one, because we let the phenomenon happen all over again. Avatar was the event of the year that everyone went to go see with their friends, boxes of Milk Duds and overpriced popcorn in hand, Coke-bottle 3-D glasses uncomfortably perched on oblivious noses, a sense of wonder in each glazed eye. And audiences didn’t bat either eye as they were assaulted with the deformed lovechild of a three-way between Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai and Pocahontas, not to mention the afterbirth of the white-power fantasies those movies aped and fulfilled at the same time. And Fern Gully had to clean the rank motel room the next day.

White man hangs out with “ethnics” or “indigenous” and reluctantly, clumsily, learns their ways and becomes so assimilated that he “wakes up” and turns his back on his recent bigoted ways to lead said “primitives” against their oppressors/invaders. What an insulting story. It claims to make the imperialist past into an all-revealing parable by making the “natives” in question a race of 12-foot tall USB-haired tree-hugging magical elf-eared Smurfs, to provide detachment.

And this time, they can win. Because there’s no way the humans will ever come back for more, right? They won’t send a larger invasion force. Nah.

Those Marines sure are evil. It’s a good thing there aren’t any parallels between the film and the current situation in Iraq. Wink, wink. Oh, Mr. Cameron, there are? There aren’t? I can’t distinguish between you in interviews and your blatant movie messages.

Did the movie entertain? Well, stuff blows up real good, guy gets the girl, good guys win, bad guy dies, etc. etc. And the CGI technology invented for the film looks great, overcoming the Uncanny Valley (Wikipedia or 30 Rock can tell you what that is). And the 3-D was not distracting or poorly done, creating lush interactive environment without cheap jump scares.

Where the movie fails is in the aspect of creating legitimate drama. The script is a boring retread, the dialogue canned, the emotions manipulative and bordering offensive in their unapologetic nature. The sci-fi begins promisingly, suggesting a planet without oxygen and aliens noticeably larger and formidable to humans, creating sci-fi nuts-and-bolts issues that would prove intriguing — all wiped out the second the ham-fisted two-hour narrative of Jake Sully begins. This won over Up in the Air? Precious? Inglourious? The Hurt Locker, the epic action movie/war commentary this movie stayed up all night wishing on a star to be? Drama implies dramatics, human dilemmas, nuanced performance. All the other films have that in spades, and two of them have some kickass action scenes too. Why did this win? Because we let Cameron off the hook with Titanic and went back in droves to be force-fed green mush.

And he won Best Director. Because he had a hand in bringing out the flat performances of the no-names like Sigourney Weaver that he was forced to work with. Right.

Most disappointing of all is how the issues of race and class and assimilation and human greed, involving aliens as an allegorical metaphor, no less, was done so much better by District 9. THIS YEAR. And that superior film was almost entirely unpredictable, expertly directed, with a genuine character as a protagonist and an alien protagonist as well. It wasn’t nominated in either category. Entertainment be damned, screw Avatar and the Golden Globes. Let’s hope the Oscars do better, and leave Avatar to score its Visual Effects awards like the popcorn movie actually deserves, leaving the dramatic accolades to the films.