re: Who would you vote for? (Oscars)

For all of its simplicities and cliches, Avatar followed the very basic rules of storytelling: It had three defined acts and its character's motivations were clear.

Gravity didn't have a first act and barely had a second act. None of the motivations made any sense. Sandra's character never would have made it to space with all of her psychological issues. NASA isn't going to spend billions on a mission to send a woman with depression issues up into space. Why is she up there anyways? Why her? Why doesn't Clooney's character know much of anything about her? It's like they just met at a diner 10 minutes before the movie started. There is no development on either of them.

At least Avatar told us why Jake was going to Pandora. It told us why humanity went there. It told us why there was a military presence was there. Outside of Michelle Rodriguez's character, everyone's motivations made sense. The story within itself made sense. We had every bit of information we needed as an audience to process what we were seeing and experiencing on screen.

Gravity didn't give that to us... at least not to me. The biggest mistake Gravity made was assuming I would care about Sandra after shite hit the fan when they gave me no reason to care about her until after shite hit the fan. You build up your audience surrogates/protagonists BEFORE they engage in conflict, not after. At least try to make me give a shite about her ultimate fate. When she was barreling towards Earth (after apparently having everything she needed in space within 10 square miles), I really didn't care if she survived or not. At that point, the best and only redeeming part of the movie (the gorgeous visual shots of space and Earth from space) were behind us.

And before someone comes in here with that whole "rebirth" nonsense, please, cut the shite.