Avatar: The Way of Water Could Show The Way to OSCARS

James Cameron doesn’t aim small. When he does a movie, it legitimately has a shot of being the greatest, biggest, box office smash hit of all time.

What was the last film he directed? A little movie called Avatar. It only did $2.923 billion at the box office and become the number 1 highest grossing film of all time garnering 9 Academy Award Nominations. Now I know what you might be saying, one lucky film, every dog has his day.

Well let’s look at the last film he directed before that. You might have heard of it, Titanic. It grossed $2.202 billion at a time when that was the Gross National Product of several nations, becoming at the time the number 1 highest grossing film of all time, until it was dethroned by Avatar. To give you a sense of how big it was, in 1998 no film had ever reached $1 billion dollars of box office gross.

Titanic was nominated for 14 Academy Awards, tying All About Eve (1950) for the most nominations of all time, and winning 11 of those nominations including Best Picture. At the time it was the most expense film ever made with a production budget of $200 million.

Over the last 10 years, the Academy has grown much nicer to major box office fare, throw in a little James Cameron and you have a recipe for an OSCARS bonanza.

Reaching the heights of Titanic with the Academy is certainly not out of the question. Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Costume Design, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Visual Effects, Best Makeup, Best Original Song, Best Original Score, Best Art Direction. That’s 13 nominations that are pretty safe. If Sam Worthington or Zoe Saldaña can light up the big screen with a powerful performance, or even Kate Winslet with a Best Actress in a Supporting Role nomination, you could push it up to 15 or 16 nominations.

This could get really big guys. Now that might sound like hyperbole, but judging off of James' Cameron’s last two films, hyperbole is really the starting point.