Avatar
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Prabhu of The Tennessean called the film a misportrayal of pantheism and Eastern spirituality in general. Annalee Newitz of io9 concluded that Avatar is another film that has the recurring "fantasy about race" whereby "some white guy" becomes the "most awesome" member of a non-white culture. Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune called Avatar "the season's ideological Rorschach blot", while Miranda Devine of The Sydney Morning Herald felt that, "It is impossible to watch Avatar without being banged over the head with the director's ideological hammer." Critics and audiences have cited similarities with other films, literature or media. Ty Burr of the Boston Globe called it "the same movie" as Dances with Wolves. Parallels to the concept and use of an avatar are in Poul Anderson's 1957 short story Call Me Joe, in which a
paralyzed man uses his mind remotely to control an alien body. Cinema audiences in Russia have noted that Avatar has elements in common with the 1960's Noon Universe novels written in the Soviet Union by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which are set in the 22nd century on a forested world called Pandora with a sentient indigenous species called the Nave. Various reviews have compared Avatar to the films FernGully: The Last Rainforest and Pocahontas. NPR's Morning Edition has compared the film to a montage of tropes, with one commentator stating that Avatar was made by mixing a bunch of film scripts in a blender. Some sources noted similarities to the artwork of Roger Dean, which featured fantastic images of floating rock formations and dragons. Avatar received compliments from fellow filmmakers, with Steven Spielberg praising it as "the most evocative and amazing science-fiction movie since Star Wars" and others calling it "audacious and awe inspiring", "master class", and "brilliant". On the other hand, Duncan Jones said: "It's not in my top three Jim Cameron films. ... at what point in the film did you have any doubt what was going to happen next?". Avatar was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. It won the awards for Art Direction, Cinematography, and Visual Effects. The New York Film Critics Online honored the film with its Best Picture award. The film also received nine nominations for the Critics' Choice Awards of the Broadcast Film Critics Association,
Awards and honors