'Avatar' still China's favorite despite Oscar snub

On Sunday Chinese netizens were glued to their sets for the 82nd Academy Awards. Not to see if HBO’s documentary “China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan” won for best documentary short, but to see if “Avatar”, the biggest blockbuster in Chinese box office history, got the credit they thought it deserved. Let's just say the night was not such a joyous one for China's netizens.

ChinaSMACK, on point as always, tapped into local (hurt) feelings about "Avatar"’s loss to "The Hurt Locker" by quoting a popular post stream on Tianya, “‘The Hurt Locker’ disposed of ‘Avatar’: The year’s greatest cups [cups being a pun on the word “tragedy”].”

China Daily’s Raymond Zhou offers one reason why Chinese netizens rootings for the American-made blockbuster “Avatar” over the ultimate winner, “The Hurt Locker”: “[Avatar] is a runaway hit [in China], and is still packing them in at all 3D venues. People can read all kinds of messages into it and many regard a trip to Pandora as their best movie experience … 'The Hurt Locker,' on the other hand, is harder to decipher. Most here tend to misinterpret its message. Even the normally liberal Beijing News reckoned it was Pentagon propaganda.”

Zhou also notes that the submissions from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan for the Best Foreign Language Film didn’t get any nods, but no one is up in arms about the Academy's neglect of “China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan”. Have netizens forgotten about the Sichuan Earthquake already?