Rick Blackwood is a Professor of English and Media Studies at Pomona College and Louisiana State University. He teaches Film and Screenwriting and below offered his thoughts on this year’s Academy Awards.

1. How seriously are the Academy Awards taken by people working within the film industry?The Academy Awards are taken very seriously by the Hollywood business community. No other awards cluster has the same $$$ impact. Some “talent” has refused to take part, people like Marlon Brando and George C. Scott. By and large though, participation proves profitable. The awards’ goal is I think to legitimize the academy’s seriousness, its mediation of art and science, technology and aesthetics, with the ever-important bottom line. It is generally better when a nominated film does well at the box office. It isn’t absolutely necessary. Any film that wins will pick up receipts, and any actors or attached talent, from directors—most of whom are, despite French theory, actually traffic cops—to make-up artists and hairdressers, will profit. It’s chic to hold box office in contempt, but everybody reads the numbers and reacts to them in one way or another. Honestly, every film is different: Who are the actors, director, producer, writer, and so on? Have important players been nominated before? There’s a measure of nostalgia, always twisting on the axis with novelty-mongering. And in truth a lot of the players are brilliant, innovative people, as is James Cameron, liked or disliked according to all kinds of prejudices.

2. What was the biggest surprise of the night?

The charm always surprises me. It’s a charm hothouse. I always need a shot of tequila to brace myself for the charm and nonetheless find myself surprised, thinking, “What sweet people!” But then I feel the same way when I watch Triumph of the Will, with its tender, Germanic oom-pah.

3. What is your reaction to The Hurt Locker and Kathryn Bigelow taking Best Picture and Best Directing over Avatar and James Cameron?

I liked Avatar. It’s dynamic. I enjoyed it, truly. The rest of the world and I are impressed. That said, Avatar is the world’s best ever three-hour cartoon. I don’t mean that ironically. It’s a huge accomplishment: Avatar is beautiful and visionary. Finally though, the people in it, and its humanity, take a backseat to spectacle. The human scenes feel computer-generated; at times it is, I think, dull and pedestrian in terms of story. In a sense, it’s the narrative of the attempt by corporate caricatures to kill two drawings of trees. The title struck me as ironically referring to the replacement of a story with 3-D and effects. That avatar works for audiences. Make of that what you will. The film is breathtaking. But so is Christmas dinner with your loved ones, if you have the right family dynamic. The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, is dazzlingly painful—and shock and visceral power can be important in garnering votes—and THL is, I contend, a much better film than Avatar. I think it’s also a better film than any other made this year. Importantly, Kathryn Bigelow offered the academy’s voters the chance to make history by giving a best director and best picture award to a woman. Someone once said Hollywood is a town run by people who look like hippies and behave like mafiosos. They like to look good. They vote and try to control the vote. The Hurt Locker is a better film. What was my reaction when The Hurt Locker won, despite the money and pressures? I cheered.

4. Best Adapted and Original Screenplay were taken home by Geoffrey Fletcher for Precious and Mark Boal for The Hurt Locker, respectively. What were your favorite scripts of the year, and of all time?

My favorite script of the year was Mark Boal’s The Hurt Locker. I like its leanness and its uncompromising focus on the problem: that war can be fun. There is a terrible honesty in that. My favorite scene, as Ms. Bigelow filmed it, was of the guy in the supermarket. I almost yelled at the screen, “No, don’t do that! You’ve hit this out of the ballpark.” And then I realized I was wrong about her cut back to home—she had made a good aesthetic call. The stillness of the scene was asphyxiating. Frozen food and him hunched over the grocery cart. All of a sudden.My favorite script of all time is Paths of Glory, written with Stanley Kubrick by Calder Willingham. It twists war—and the art of the possible—in the other direction. I especially like the ambiguity of Colonel Dax’s proposal to free the condemned men by destroying General Mireau: it is as dishonest as Mireau’s plot to blame the men’s cowardice, and yet Dax’s is the only course—sacrificing Mireau to the politer lie—that offers a solution that might work. This is the real beginning of Kubrick in movies, for me. The execution at the end is so elegant, ugly, and brutish. As a prequel to 2001, you can’t beat Paths of Glory. And then Christiane Harlan’s song for the coda, “The Faithful Hussar,” is as unpredictable and heartbreaking as the waltzes of the starchild.

4.7. Robert Downey Jr. characterized the working relationship of actors and screenwriters as “a collaboration between handsome, gifted people, and sickly little mole people.” How would you characterize it?

I believe Mark Boal’s “gifts” compare well to Downey’s. Downey wins on charm, and it’s borne him over a lot of trouble. I think here though, for not the first time, he’s letting his alligator mouth get his parakeet ass into ennui. He should take a lesson from that other genius, Mel Gibson, and stick to explaining the world to cops.