James Cameron, who else, brought up some interesting points regarding the Academy barely acknowledging and honoring science fiction fare:
Cameron spoke to WIRED, and said it was "Annie Hall" beating "Star Wars" that made him realize the uphill climb that was ahead.
“The first time I noticed this was when I was just a movie fan and not a practitioner yet, when ‘Star Wars,’ which to me was the ultimate science-fiction film of its day, so this would have been 1977, probably the Oscars of 1978, lost to ‘Annie Hall. This little cute relationship story and ‘Star Wars.’ What the fuck are you people thinking?”
Cameron lays the Oscar blame on how some voters just can't connect on a humanistic level with the genre, basically that it’s not about real people. Whatever the hell that means. Cameron says that it all just isn't true:
“All movies are artifice. Movies are innately artificial. The truth underlies the artifact,” he said. “The truth of what you’re saying is the connection with the audience. Science-fiction can do that like any other genre.”
“It drives me nuts every year,” Cameron said. “There is science-fiction that plays by the rules of good drama and that is important conceptually and that says something about our society and that has great characters. The Academy just has a blindspot about it. They’ll award it technical stuff but not the real stuff, not the acting.”
James Cameron recently told IndieWire that the future of science-fiction is very bright and predicts 'a science-fiction movie will win the best picture Oscar in the next five to 10 years.” I believe that. We are going through not just a golden age of horror in American cinema, but Science-Fiction is going through its own little phase as well.
The list speaks for itself:
Mad Max; Fury Road, Ex Machina, Looper, Arrival, Edge of Tomorrow, Source Code, Melancholia, Attack the Block, Upstream Color, Her, Interstellar, Snowpiercer, Inception, Gravity, Prometheus, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Super 8, Limitless, Under the Skin, Predestination, Dredd, Safety Not Guaranteed, Pacific Rim, The Martian, Midnight Special, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049.
That's 24 good to great Science Fiction films in the last 6 years. I think we can safely assert that we're living in a sort of golden-age for sci-fi.
"Avatar" reignited the craving for science fiction at the movies. Look at the years preceding "Avatar"; there was almost no studio backed sci fi coming out. Then Avatar comes out, breaks the box-office record, gets nominated for Best Picture, and introduces us to newly discovered technology, it opened the studios to hopping on board the band wagon and visionary directors figured out they could suddenly realize visions they didn't think were possible."