Before this year, across every Academy Awards celebration, only four science-fiction movies had ever been nominated for Best Picture: Dr. Strangelove (if you count it as sci-fi), A Clockwork Orange, Star Wars and E.T. None of them had ever won. The nomination of District 9 and Avatar increased that number of nominations in the genre by fifty percent.
Now, perhaps I'm a science-fiction sentimentalist. But I deeply hope that trend will continue. I think it's no coincidence that two sci-fi movies are nominated this year (Even if those nominations were enabled by the expansion of the Best Picture category. I think Avatar would have been nominated if there were only five movies, but that District 9 would not have been, which, in and of itself, says a mouthful about how the Academy values movies.). Science fiction's always been an incredibly valuable source of metaphors, whether about politics, or race, or religion, or capacity for wonder, or any kind of otherness. But those metaphors are increasingly close to the actual problems that we face, and the gap between the possibilities of science in science fiction and reality is closing at an accelerating rate. The Academy may be slower than some of us to recognize the value, the importance of that convergence.
It was never going to happen last night. And even if Avatar had emerged victorious, I think it would have been more about the commercial power and technological advances of James Cameron's latest behemoth than about a true recognition of the trend. But I do think we'll see a science fiction Best Picture winner soon. The future is undeniable, in movies as well as in life.