Topical Blog Post 2

There is a point in everyone’s academic career when you have to look at the current state of line of business that you are trying to get into. Business majors have to look at the amount of small companies that succeed and fail, science majors have to look at the all of the most current advances in their field. I am a journalism major, specifically one that aspires to be a film critic, so naturally, I must keep in touch with all of the most current films in the world. This is a far more painful task than one might think.
I am not one of those people who believe that there was a “golden age” of film. It is a fact of life that whenever something is considered a masterpiece of its given media that there must be others that are inferior, but Hollywood has strayed a long way from the days of Gone With the Wind and Citizen Kane. So far, in fact, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to pick out the good films from the constant flow of mind numbing commercialism that passes off as a feature film. In summary, the problem with Hollywood is not that they are making so many bad films, but that they are not making enough good ones, and this changes what the world idea of a “good film” is.
The event that sparked this notion in me was when James Cameron’s Avatar was nominated for several academy awards. This is a film that, by all means, should be considered mediocre by the standards of the academy. It had a recycled plot and average acting that was only backed up by the sheer amounts of money Cameron threw into the special effects portion of his “masterpiece”. If I wanted to watch this movie again I would rent Dances With Wolves, a far superior film made for less than 1/15th of Avatar’s budget.
Films are an art form, and one that should be respected. A film is not made great by the names that appear in the credits or the amount of money that is thrown into it. Films are made great when someone puts their emotions and thought and ideas onto film. I sincerely hope that Hollywood realizes this by the time I graduate.