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Should There Be a Sci-Fi Category At the Oscars?
An anonymous reader writes "In this chat with the originator of the light-saber in Star Wars and the Nostromo in Alien, director Roger Christian argues that the Academy Awards needs a special category for 'best science-fiction film.' It's a thorny subject, since such a new category would inevitably either get lumped in with fantasy/horror or further 'ghetto-ise' the genre. But with 2001 and Avatar snubbed for best picture, among many others over the years, does ANY sci-fi film ever have a shot at Best Picture?"
Minority Report, Equilibrium, Firefly, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Serenity, District 9, Inception, Sucker Punch ... it wasn't all bad.
OK, the best were TV series. And yes, I was trolling with that last one.
Perhaps there should be a Best Picture category at the Hugos instead.
There already is. The Hugo award for Best Dramatic Presentation has been in operation since 1958. 2001 won the award in 1968, Avatar was nominated in 2010, but lost to Moon (which is arguably a better movie).
I discovered this category a couple of years ago, and have found the list of winners and nominees very instructive. It's alerted me to a lot of good movies which I would otherwise have missed.
I am a Statistician. One false move and you are a Statistic
You mean Gandalf.
While I agree with your point, I don't think that was a good example. It's unfair to Tolkien to call it mere hand waving to fix a problem in the story, when his death and rebirth is obviously done on purpose, and the whole background is explained in The Silmarillion, which he had written years before.
There's still no real boundaries - after all, it was a direct intervention by Eru Ilúvatar - but it's not just hand waving.
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You're not referring to the right books.
It wasn't "I, Robot" (which was a short-story collection) he merged with Foundation. It was the Daneel Olivaw line (Caves of Steel / The Naked Sun / The Robots of Dawn / Robots and Empire) that he merged with Foundation at the end. At best, the I, Robot short stories (along with several other short stories, novelettes, and novels like Pebble in the Sky) provided a theoretical "history" of the human-centric universe he eventually wrote the Foundation series within.
Asimov's stories were a lot like Tolkien's stuff in a way. He had an idea of a long-running universe, and he would place various stories at various points within the universes. The long-running character Daneel Olivaw is really not so different from Gandalf in a way, doing a lot of things "behind the scenes" that are hard to ferret out until you start looking at the long view as well - and they take much the same turn, with Gandalf bailing out to the East with the Elves at the end of LOTR just like Olivaw tries to get "a few more years" to finish his work and set humanity onto a new evolution before he has to finally die.