In response to my musings about the effects work in Lord of the Rings and Avatar, That Fuzzy Bastard weighed in with a strong, and I think persuasive, pro-Lord of the Rings defense. He writes in comments:
I think the featureless slickness of Avatar has a lot to do with dependence on CG, specifically with the way that a movie where every shot is CG (even non-Pandora shots got extensive digital reworking), there's no baseline of reality.
There's a story that Stanislavsky used to threaten his actors by saying he was going to put an animal on stage with them---"It will be so natural and real on stage, that you will all look artificial by comparison." Similarly, when there's a mixture of CGI and analog effects, you have something to compare the CG to. But when you're in a totally digital environment, it's very easy to end up creating effects that look cool in the workstation, but would have been altered if you had any real-world examples next to them. I've been struck by how lousy Avatar looks in previews, and how much more impressed people are when seeing it, and I think that's the reason---it looks great so long as you're not comparing it to anything.
And in a post on his own blog (huge props, by the way, for the Lester Bangs reference), writes:
We may never, as Lester Bangs says, agree on anything like we agreed on Elvis, but the LotR trilogy comes close. And just like the LotR books are a sort of compressed history of Middle Earth, so are the LotR films a compressed history of film. They deploy every special effects technique ever invented, from Meliés-style forced perspective to artificial-intelligence-driven CGI (with plenty of models, makeup, and mattes in between), and also makes use of every directing technique ever conceived, from the Griffith-esque battle scenes to contemporary digitally-controlled camera swoops. Like Joyce's Dubliners, If every other film was destroyed but these, you could still extract everything that had ever been.