Pajiba

That is sad that Hurt Locker only got that much money. The Oscar attention didn't help it at all really.

Fichtner steals that film. Steals it.

...and I'm not saying Titanic deserved Best Picture. I didn't think it was.

Other than I remember it being very tense, I don't remember a single other damned thing about The Hurt Locker. I guess, from those numbers, no one really cared either.

If you want historical accuracy that badly, go watch History of the World: Part 1.

Other than I remember it being very tense, I don't remember a single other damned thing about The Hurt Locker.

Hurt Locker had an estimated production budget of $15mil and at its widest release was in 535 theaters. Take into consideration marketing campaigns on top of that, it's really a more in-depth reason than TL;DR.

sars-

Because part of the marketing behind Titanic was that it was being built up as a historical movie. They blathered endlessly about how they went down to the actual wreck, and built sets based on pictures and plans of the ship and all the background characters were in fact based on the actual passengers and all the time and money invested in making this as historically accurate as possible. So yeah, it was kinda sorta being billed as both historical and factual. Much of the deleted material included factual events sacrificed for the forwarding of the irritating fictitious one. It was unnecessary. The real event and the days leading up to it were interesting enough a story without munging it up. And no, I knew going into it the main story was fake. I still find it troubling that many (young) viewers thought there was any truth behind the movie's story, but then again many of these twits thought The Blair Witch Project was in fact the real thing too so all you can do at laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Even so between the box office and awards, I couldn't help but feel a sense of grave robbing. To me it felt like Cameron took the event of 1,500 very real people dying to promote his very pretty looking but otherwise shit story. If Titanic was a made up ship, then that would be okay. But it's equivalent to taking Schindler's List and jamming a falsified one-night stand between two imaginary characters while the lines of doomed Jews marched past to their final fate. Now I'm not saying Spielberg doesn't make movies to make money, but it felt more like he was trying to do something meaningful with the subject. But with Cameron it came across (and always has been) all about the Benjamins. And the fact that he was given an Oscar for it cheapens the significance of it all the more. But to be fair there have been many, many of these moments before and since that make the gravity of this award that much more overrated.

bleujayone -

I have to disagree with your view that Titanic was marketed as "historical and factual." Cameron has always said that the movie was conceived as a love story with the Titanic as the setting and some historical persons used as a basis for characters in the movie. I don't think there's an all-or-nothing categorization between a history lesson and a completely fictional work. Cameron sought to set his love story, however trite and schmaltzy it might have been, on the Titanic in part to give the audience an idea of how things might have happened on the Titanic. Titanic, were it not so bloated and epic, is really similar to Mad Men in that the narrative is fictional, but more nerdy attention to detail and research is given to costumes/props, let's say, than other movies. But that doesn't mean it was aiming for complete historical accuracy. If teenagers hot for Leo thought English Rose and Wisconsin Jack were real, that's not really Cameron's fault.

I always assumed Marty won because it was a big hit like Rocky.

The more you know.

I started watching The Hurt Locker with my boyfriend and we shut it off halfway through because I had seen a bunch of documentaries about Iraq and Afghanistan that told the exact same story except they were real. The movie wasn't horrible, but with docs like No End In Sight, Restrepo, Killing In The Name, The Pat Tillman Story, Poster Girl, and Alive Day Memories you'd be better off supporting the documentaries.

Just because a movie makes oodles of cash doesn't necessarily mean it's a good movie and just because it does not it doesn't mean it is one of poor quality. Maybe it was badly marketed, maybe it had bad timing, maybe it had tougher competition in the theaters. Maybe the right audience didn't find it. Who is to say? Then again just like financial success, just because you happen to win one of these faux-golden idols, doesn't mean you've been justified either.