Jesus. Deadline Hollywood is reporting that Avatar director James Cameron is set to make a $350 million (MILLION) payday off of the $2.7 billion success of the film. Can you believe that? Apparently, Cameron has some kind of sweetheart deal with the studio where he gets a percentage of the theatrical gross, plus an even bigger cut of the DVD sales. Considering Avatar did make $2.7 billion, Cameron’s payday is about 13% of the total gross. And how much did it cost to make and promote Avatar? A lot. Like $500 million or more. But that’s still more than a billion dollars of pure profit for the studio. So everybody wins!

I’m told this will be the biggest financial haul ever for a movie director from a single pic because James Cameron had a significant gross percentage of the Twentieth Century Fox megahit as helmer, writer, and producer. Though Hollywood pay experts tell me that the $350M all-in figure is largely attributable to his directing deal structured as “first dollar” gross or more likely “at cash break” gross. It’s certainly bigger than either he or the studio — or anyone — thought he’d make from Avatar which, after its December 2009 release date, has grossed a best-ever $2.7 billion worldwide at the box office.

“But Cameron is making $350 million because the DVD did beyond expectation,” an insider tells me. Indeed, its 2D DVD and Blu-Ray worldwide sales smashed records in all categories. And still to come is the release of its 3D DVD in November. Meanwhile, yesterday, Twentieth Century Fox and Cameron announced that a “Special Edition” Avatar will be released in theaters August 27th as a limited engagement and exclusively in Digital 3D and IMAX 3D. This version will include more than 8 minutes of new footage. “With Cameron making $350 million, can you imagine what Fox and Dune Entertainment and Ingenious Media are making?” one of my insiders wondered, referring to the three companies that together bankrolled Avatar. And let’s not forget there’ll be an Avatar sequel… and maybe a threequel as part of what Cameron has been calling a “trilogy-scaled arc of story”. And the production costs on the subsequent films should be far less because they’ve honed the 3D filmmaking technology process.

Forbes magazine about a week ago placed Cameron only #2 on its Celebrity 100 money ranking this year of the richest and most powerful actors, actresses, musicians and other well known showbiz figures. In fact, based on my insiders, Cameron should have been #1 because his $350M far exceeds the $315M which the magazine said top-ranked Oprah Winfrey earned. Forbes underestimated the director’s pay at only $210M.

My sources tell me that Cameron’s $350M take from Avatar also eclipses his reported $97M haul from the previous #1 biggest movie worldwide, Titanic. But that figure will go higher, too. Earlier this year, Cameron revealed that Titanic will be re-released in 3D in April 2012, in order to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the actual ship. In total, Cameron’s directorial efforts have grossed approximately $5.75 billion worldwide.

It’s now the stuff of Hollywood legend that Cameron wrote the script for Avatar back in the mid-1990s when he and Stan Winston co-founded Digital Domain. He took the screenplay to their special effects lab only to be told it was just not possible to make the film with the current technology. So he sat on the project for more than a decade. To make Avatar, Cameron created the Fusion Camera System technology for photo-realistic computer-generated characters through motion capture animation. So the director has an ever brighter financial future because he now can sell that technology to 3D filmmakers all over the world. And he’ll get top dollar for it, to be sure.

[From Deadline]

You know what I was thinking about? How attractive James Cameron is right at this moment. He’s just lovely and sexy and not at all reminiscent of a middle-aged lesbian with bad hair. I wonder if his wife Suzy Amis is as turned on right now as I am? Do you think she decided to splurge and eat a cookie? If I was married to a man who just made $350 million, I would eat a cookie. A cookie made of diamonds and James Cameron’s wang.

Ooh, look at my lover. Tell me you don’t want to lick him.

James & Suzy on April 22 & 25, 2010. James on March 10, 2010. Credit: WENN.

I’m conflicted about reporting this story because it breaks my heart to think of the devastation that’s going on in the Gulf right now. There’s also the very thorny issue of who is responsible, and whether President Obama and his team have properly handled the efforts to stop the massive oil leak from wreaking further havoc on the ocean’s ecosystem. Ultimately I think that BP is responsible but that the government should have stepped in sooner and more forcefully with experts from around the world instead of relying on a money-grubbing oil company to be able to clean up the mess caused from their own incompetence. Kaiser pointed me to this post Exxon Valdez law that holds energy companies responsible for cleaning up their messes that may have tied Obama’s hands and made it impossible to take jurisdiction away from BP.

While we’re watching this mess worsen hourly, all sorts of people have chimed in to try and stop this environmental disaster. There are a lot of good ideas out there. One of the people volunteering their expertise and equipment is producer/director James Cameron, who is best known for the hit Avatar.

Before we all jump on the “give me a break” bandwagon, let me say that Cameron has produced several incredible documentaries about the deep sea. He has an intimate knowledge of the ocean along with owning state of the art submarines that are advanced enough to explore the deepest and harshest regions of the ocean. I’ve seen an IMAX documentary called Volcanoes of The Deep Sea that was produced by Cameron, and it was truly awe-inspiring that he was able to get such clear footage from the very bottom of the ocean. (The movie also gave me a lot to think about in terms of the way the earth formed and how life evolved and I would recommend it.) If he can help at all, BP should take him up on his offer:

Mr Cameron, a billionaire after directing two of the highest grossing films of all time, contacted BP over the weekend to offer the use of his deep-dive craft. It is understood he has owned the craft since filming Titanic more than a decade ago.
He suggested that the manned vessels, currently in Lake Baikal in the former Soviet Union, could be used below water as part of BP’s sub-sea effort to repair the leaking oil rig, Deepwater Horizon.

BP is currently using 12 remotely operated vessels – known as ‘ROV’s’ – to carry out repair work to the blow-out preventer, the damaged safety device which sits atop the stricken rig, as part of its continuing relief effort.

Each of the ROV’s is roughly the size of a rubbish skip, and its two robotic arms are controlled by workers on ships at sea level to which they are tethered.

To date the ROV’s have been used to remove one of the two control panels from the blow-out preventer, and mend parts of its cabling ahead of the next stage in the relief operation.

That stage, known as top-hatting, will see BP attempt to propel various forms of dense material – including golf balls and pieces of car tyre – into the blow-out preventer to fill the leak, material which will be followed by mud and then cement in order to close off the well.

To date, BP has not taken Mr Cameron up on what a spokesman described as a “certainly a generous offer,” saying it has already been liaising with the US Department of Defence should it need to use manned submarines.

The Hollywood mogul’s suggestion was described as “long-term iron in the fire”, with some doubt expressed as to how exactly his vessels would be transported to the Gulf of Mexico.

BP already has what chief executive Tony Hayward described as an “armada” of 5,500 vessels involved in the rescue and clean-up operation, as well as “a small airforce including four Hercules C130s which are bombing the hell out of it [the slick] with dispersant”.

The company, which is working with rivals including ExxonMobil and Chevron plus government agencies including the US Coastguard and the US Geological Survey to take control of the looming environment disaster, is preparing to begin the top-hatting process in the next ten days.

The first step will come in the next day or so, when BP reinstalls one of the control panels on the blow-out preventer to give it the ability to operate the valves on the so-called “choke and feel” lines down which the dense material will be pumped.

Mr Hayward said that the US government, following a series of high-level visits to the affected region including one this week from Energy Secretary Steven Chu, is growing “increasingly confident that we have a method to intervene in a way that will lead to [a] permanent intervention.”

[From Telegraph.co.uk]

The people at BP have proven that they are complete idiots who will follow their own interests at all costs. Cameron knows what he’s doing and from most accounts he’s a hard ass who likes to step in and take contol. He’s also a committed environmentalists whose films deal with struggles between large corporate interests and basic human values. BP probably won’t deal with him, but they should. It would be poetic justice if Cameron’s efforts helped finally put an end to this tragedy. I’m praying that someone can do it sooner rather than later. All we’ve seen from BP is a bunch of cover ups and failed attempts.

While BP may be reluctant to deal with Cameron, the government isn’t. According to Radar he had a summit meeting with the EPA on Tuesday as part of a team of “officials, scientists and engineers” dedicated to finding a solution to stop the oil leak.

The LA Times has an exhaustive interview with James Cameron, and it was frankly hard for me to get through it all. The guy sounds pretty far up his own ass, but he does make excellent movies that bring in record bank. I also admire his stance on social causes and the environment, which he of course very heavy-handedly represents in his work.

Two main pieces of news in this interview stood out for me – that Avatar is going to be re-released in August in Imax with a whopping six minutes more of footage – being shot now, (that’s sarcasm, I don’t always convey that well) and that there will be a sequel, to focus on the ocean on Pandora. The sequel is news to me, although the news has probably already been out. I wouldn’t consider an Avatar sequel inevitable since there was no Titanic sequel (in that case they didn’t have anywhere to go though I guess) and since Avatar cost so much to make. Will the Avatar sequel be a pale version of the original that will spawn alternate titles like “Avatar: Waterworld?” and does it matter? Whatever they do with this film people will flock to see it. It will probably make more money in the re-release than most movies make around the world and in DVD sales.

PD: Will we see an “Avatar” theatrical re-release this summer?

JC: We’re working on finishing an additional six minutes of the film — which includes a lot of Weta work — for a theatrical re-release in August. We were sold out of our Imax performances right up to the moment until they were contractually obligated to switch to “Alice in Wonderland,” so we know we left money on the table there. And the 3-D really helped “Avatar” right up until the moment that it hurt it. And it hurt it at the moment “Alice” and then “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Clash of the Titans” came in and sucked up all the 3-D screens. We went from declining 8% a week to declining 50%. Clearly, it wasn’t market forces directly; it was the availability of theaters. So we’re going to wait until there’s a time to come back in, inject the new footage into the mix and see if we can interest people in the “Avatar” experience in theaters.

It’ll be interesting because it’ll be on DVD by then, but I think “Avatar” is kind of a unique category where people are enjoying the unique theatrical experience even though they may have seen it on the small screen.

PD: Is your interest moving from cinema toward public policy?

JC: Not specifically. Look, I’m an artist. I’m just going to be a big mouth and blather my opinions around, as artists are wont to do. That’s fine. In the particular case of “Avatar,” I found there’s a call to action and a sense of duty that’s emerged from it. It wasn’t my intention going into [the film] to do that. I figured I’d be on vacation right now. I figured I’d make my big statement with the movie and let everyone else sort out what to do. Turns out there aren’t that many people figuring out what to do. The leaders have been scared off, people of conscience in our leadership in Washington have been scared off by the right and the fossil fuel lobbies. They won’t even use the term “sustainability” or “climate change” in an energy bill, which is ludicrous on its face. It completely ignores the elephant in the room that we’re all dealing with. The average American doesn’t even believe climate change is real, they think it’s all a hoax. Two years ago, 50% of Americans thought climate change was real and thought it was human caused. Now we’re down to a third. That’s the work of a very well-funded campaign to create a climate of denial in the media. You’ve got to work against that. Here’s my philosophy in life: If there’s a fire, you put it out. If there’s a flood, you fill sandbags and you build a dike. You roll up your sleeves and you get to work. I think we’re facing that kind of crisis and I’m not going to stand around and leave it to someone else to deal with it.

PD: When you embark on your next film project, do you know what the challenge will be? Something on par with filming underwater for “The Abyss” or perfecting the performance capture technology in “Avatar”?

JC: Well you’ve already defined what the challenge will be on the next “Avatar” picture, which is to do what we did before at half the price and in half the time. Again, that’s an impossible goal, we won’t accomplish that, but if we can reduce by 25% in both categories, we’ll have really accomplished something. We know our methodology works. We also know it took two years to come up with. It didn’t even become efficient until the last two months of the production. So we were four years into a project before we had this machine running smoothly. So we take a snapshot of that moment in our production and say that’s what we look like on Day 1, we’re going to do better. Now, none of that has anything to do with coming up with a great story or great characters or great new settings and so on. That all is a given. That’s not to say that it’s done yet, it’s a given that we have to do that. But for me, the technical challenge is in improving the process having proved that it works.

We created a broad canvas for the environment of film. That’s not just on Pandora, but throughout the Alpha Centauri AB system. And we expand out across that system and incorporate more into the story – not necessarily in the second film, but more toward a third film. I’ve already announced this, so I might as well say it: Part of my focus in the second film is in creating a different environment – a different setting within Pandora. And I’m going to be focusing on the ocean on Pandora, which will be equally rich and diverse and crazy and imaginative, but it just won’t be a rain forest. I’m not saying we won’t see what we’ve already seen; we’ll see more of that as well.

[From The LA Times]

My son has a really fascinating little book called The Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs that I think we got at TJ Maxx. It’s an incredible look into the age of dinosaurs and how much different the earth was some 225-65 million years ago. I think that’s part of the appeal of Avatar – it offers an alternate, immersive look into a world not unlike our own. Life began in the sea and it sounds fitting that Cameron would focus the next film on the dinosaur-like creatures in Pandora’s oceans. Whether he’ll be able to do it with the same level of depth and characterization as the last film remains to be seen, but again when it comes to dollars it probably won’t matter.

Sigourney Weaver came off a little “sour grapes” in a recent press conference promoting “Avatar” in Brazil this weekend. Weaver has a long history of working with the blockbuster movie’s director, James Cameron, and she thinks his snub at this year’s Academy Awards was intentional on the part of the Academy. Weaver hinted that the Oscar voters were intent on making Kathryn Bigelow, Cameron’s ex-wife and director of “The Hurt Locker,” the feel-good story of the awards season by making her the first female director to take home a trophy.

While promoting ‘Avatar’ in Brazil over the weekend, Sigourney Weaver slammed the Academy for voting for ‘The Hurt Locker’ and Kathryn Bigelow. She said Jim Cameron lost to his ex-wife, Kathryn Bigelow, because she’s a woman–who became the first ever to take home the Best Director Oscar.

“Jim didn’t have breasts, and I think that was the reason,” she told told Folha Online, a Brazilian news site. “He should have taken home that Oscar.”

Weaver also voiced her disapproval of the Best Picture choice, suggesting it should have gone to ‘Avatar.’

“In the past, ‘Avatar’ would have won because they [Oscar voters] loved to hand out awards to big productions, like ‘Ben-Hur.’ Today it’s fashionable to give the Oscar to a small movie that nobody saw,” Weaver said.

‘The Hurt Locker’ has taken in a total of $40 million worldwide ($16 million in the US), while ‘Avatar’ has grossed a whopping $2.7 billion worldwide ($743.7 million in the US).

[From Huffington Post]

Let’s hope Sigourney was just kidding around, otherwise she comes off as kind of a bitch here. I mean, it is pretty obvious that “Avatar” is a huge commercial success over “The Hurt Locker,” so what if it didn’t take home any Oscars? I also think it’s quite presumptuous of Weaver to say that if James Cameron were a woman, or it Kathryn Bigelow were not, the voting results would be different. Maybe the Academy didn’t vote for James because they didn’t think his movie was all that great, visual effects aside. Or maybe it’s because James Cameron has a reputation for being an egomaniac and an asshole, and voters didn’t want to make his head any bigger. Who knows?

Remember when Sacha Baron Cohen managed to land right in Eminem’s lap at the MTV movie awards? Cohen was in character as Austrian Bruno at the time, and he flew through the air on cables dressed as an angel. He ended up flipping over and lowering onto Eminem’s seat, his bare ass cheeks and crotch right in Eminem’s face. Em left all pissed off, just as could be expected, and then later tried to play it off like he knew about the stunt ahead of time. Well, Oscar night producers wanted to avoid a similar scenario with Director James Cameron. Cohen had a whole skit planned out with Ben Stiller in which he would have been dressed like a female Navii from Avatar who accused Cameron of getting her pregnant with his love child. Producers were afraid of offending Cameron and decided to scrap it, though. Cohen’s rep said that the segment was canned due to “creative differences,” but insiders say that an Oscar Producer who worked with Cameron realized that the guy didn’t have the sense of humor needed to graciously accept that he was being mocked.

An insider familiar with the Oscar telecast tells Vulture that an Avatar sketch planned by Baron Cohen and Ben Stiller was nixed yesterday by show producer Bill Mechanic, who worried that Cameron would be so offended by it that he might even walk out of the Oscar broadcast on live TV.
So what skit could possibly so incense the HMFIC?

Our insider informs us that Baron Cohen planned to appear onstage as a blue-skinned, female Na’vi, with Stiller translating “her” interplanetary speech. As the skit went on, though, it would become clear that Stiller wasn’t translating properly, because Cohen would grow ever more upset. At its climax, an infuriated Baron Cohen would pull open “her” evening gown to reveal that s/he was pregnant, knocked up with Cameron’s love child, and would go on to confront her baby daddy as if s/he were on Jerry Springer.

Mechanic, now both a producer of motion pictures and of this year’s Oscar telecast, was head of Twentieth Century Fox when Cameron’s Titanic famously went massively over budget and over schedule, so he’s well acquainted with Cameron’s sense of humor — or lack of it. “Let’s just say that Cameron isn’t known to be, shall we say, ‘self-deprecating,’” explained one insider familiar with the decision to cut the sketch.

Academy spokesperson Toni Thompson would only confirm that Baron Cohen was no longer presenting, but Baron Cohen’s spokesman, Matt Labov, tells Vulture that “I hate to use the term, because it’s so ubiquitous, but there were ‘creative differences.’ Nothing acrimonious, but both sides felt that since they couldn’t agree, [Cohen] might as well remain in London.” (Calls to Mechanic’s office were not returned at deadline.)

[From NYMag via WeSmirch]

That’s a shame as it would have added some obnoxious levity to the show. I have to say that last year wasn’t half bad, though, and that attempts to get the Oscars to lighten up and be more entertaining really worked. The skits were fun and I loved that they brought the stage and the audience closer together. There were also short touching tributes from fellow actors to each of the nominees. Overall they did a great job. I’m hoping that they’re going for a similar less formal format this year and that they keep up the momentum throughout the ceremony. Oh and they can always make it a little shorter!

Once again, if you thought Linda Hamilton was going to go gently into that good night, you have been sorely mistaken. As her ex-husband (James Cameron) and one of her ex-husband’s other ex-wives (Kathryn Bigelow) battle it out for the Best Director Oscar, Linda Hamilton just won’t shut up about her divorce from James Cameron, which, by the way, was more than 11 years ago. She gave a lengthy and delusional interview to The Daily Mail less than a month ago, and now she’s given another one (albeit, a shorter one) to The Lady Magazine (a British mag for, you guessed it, the ladies). Linda is still railing about ex-husband “Jimbo” and how their marriage was “terrible on every level”. Jesus, Linda. Get it together.

Cameron has been married five times and Hamilton, who played Sarah Connor in the Terminator franchise, was wife number four. The couple wed in 1997, the year that Cameron made Titanic. It went on to win 11 Oscars, but Hamilton said the film’s success made their marriage even worse.

“It was terrible on every level. I wasn’t ready, he wasn’t ready. He was terribly insecure that I was going to ruin it for him somehow, which didn’t make sense since I am an actress in my own right and had been in front of the camera. It was dreadful,” she said.

“Jimbo gave me a big diamond but our marriage was all of nine months, the ring meant nothing to me and I gave it away.”

Hamilton said she hated accompanying her husband to awards ceremonies because their relationship was falling apart behind the scenes.

In an interview with The Lady magazine, the actress claimed: “The parading around, the lunches, the stress of being with Jim during the Titanic days – for years I could barely get make-up on, I was shaking so hard, because every damn award show we had was terrible.”

The marriage ended in 1999 and a year later Cameron married his fifth wife, actress Suzy Amis. Despite their problems, Hamilton, 53, insisted: “I’ve never loved anyone like that since and if I did it would be a different game.”

Hamilton read an early Avatar script when she was with Cameron and was unimpressed, but changed her mind on seeing the finished product. She has watched it twice: “That’s how much I liked it. And I paid both times. I was invited to the screenings [but] I was like, ‘Thanks, Jim, I’ll get this one on my own’.”

In previous interviews, Hamilton has described Cameron as work-obsessed. “Titanic was the mistress he left me for. He was the kind of man who really would rather be at work with the mistress than at home with the wife. That was hard to come to terms with,” she said recently.

Cameron’s first marriage, to Sharon Williams, lasted from 1978-84. He was married to producer Gale Anne Hurd from 1985-89, then to director Kathryn Bigelow from 1989-1991, before Hamilton and Amis.

He and Bigelow will compete for the best director and best picture Oscars on Sunday. Avatar and Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker have nine nominations each.

Hamilton said Cameron was a faithful husband despite his track record of divorces. “He’s not a cheater, he’s a serial monogamist,” she explained.

[From The Telegraph]

Look, I get it. It’s eleven years later and she’s still hung up on the guy, and she thinks that she’s still relevant. So she does this push-pull in interviews of “I hate him, he’s horrible, out marriage was a train wreck and it’s all his fault” while saying in the same breath “I love him so much, I’ll always love him, he’s amazing, he’ll be coming back to me any day now, right?” The thing is that every time Linda opens her mouth, I just end up feeling for Cameron. And I know I shouldn’t! He’s got more money than God, he’s one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, and I’m pretty sure that he really is a terrible person. But something about Linda makes me sympathetic towards him.

Linda Hamilton in London on February 4, 2010. Credit: WENN.

The Oscars are coming soon, and I can’t wait. As the campaigns reach a fever pitch, certain categories are being solidified, and other categories are still up for grabs. It’s pretty much a shoo-in that Jeff Bridges is going to take Best Actor, and although Sandra Bullock is the easy choice for Best Actress, I could conceivably see Meryl Streep as the “underdog” winner. Christoph Waltz is definitely going home with Best Supporting Actor, and Mo’Nique is probably going to win Supporting Actress, although that one isn’t as established as many think.

One of the biggest contests of the year will be for Best Director and Best Picture. James Cameron and Avatar seem like the easy favorites – Avatar, after all, has made a bajillion dollars, and Cameron and his team pretty much invented a new way to make movies. So you’d think Cameron and Avatar would be the established winners by now, right? Not so much. Because Hollywood loves to shatter a glass ceiling, and this year that glass ceiling might be for the first woman to ever win Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow, director of The Hurt Locker. She also happens to be Cameron’s ex-wife. And she also happens to be a director Cameron has long-championed.

When Cameron was being interviewed by Charlie Rose yesterday, he claimed that his “fantasy” was for Bigelow to win Best Director, and for Avatar to win Best Picture. Which is honestly how I think it’s going to go down, but it’s still nice to hear Cameron be so magnanimous with a fellow director, not to mention his ex-wife. HuffPo has the video, but here’s the transcript of the exchange with Charlie Rose:

Charlie Rose:
What do you make of this competition between you and Kathryn Bigelow? Two very different people who married. But more than that, two people who share this sense of wanting to be good filmmakers.
James Cameron:
Yeah, I think we’re really not that different in so many ways, and we know that about each other, that we’re both dedicated to the craft. And for both of us, it’s very much about the work and about a total, consuming passion for filmmaking. And you know, I think that’s what drew us together, is each respected the other’s passion and craft and so on, plus she was gorgeous.
Charlie Rose:
Is gorgeous.
James Cameron:
Yeah. You know, but in our minds, it’s not a competition. That’s a narrative that’s imposed by others, because it’s, you know, it makes a good story. We’re so celebratory of each other’s work, and we’ve remained — you know, I produced two of her films, one of which I produced — wrote and produced — wrote it with Jay Cocks — after we were divorced. So, we’ve worked together, and we’ve been supportive colleagues. She saw “Avatar” five times at different stages of its development, from very crude –

Charlie Rose:
You mean you would go show it to her and say tell me what you think.
James Cameron:
Yeah. She’s come over — and tirelessly come over, watch the film. This is over a period of six or eight months and give me notes and even Mark Boal, who wrote “The Hurt Locker,” came and gave me very good notes, very helpful notes. And they had shared Hurt Locker with me earlier on.

Charlie Rose:
Right.
James Cameron:
And my note was very simple. Don’t change a damn thing. You know, because they showed it to me fairly late in the process because I had been shooting. And I said, don’t change a damn thing. This thing is great. And they were, of course, very nervous –

Charlie Rose:
Why is it so great, do you think?
James Cameron:
I think just because it’s consummately good filmmaking — excuse me, consummately good filmmaking. I mean, you are in those guys’ shoes, and you’re there. I mean, I have been at screenings and watched people literally sit on the edge of their seat, literally. I mean, you hear that expression all the time. Literally sit forward for the entire movie, hand clinched like this. It’s that tight. It’s that taught, you know. And for her to — I mean, she’s outgunned the guys, you know, definitely. And of course, her –

Charlie Rose:
You’re not surprised by that.
James Cameron:
Not at all, not at all because she’s always done that. But it’s the recognition, you know, finally the recognition catching up with the scope of her talent.

Charlie Rose:
So if someone sitting there says, look, I’m going to give it to Cameron, best picture but Bigelow best director –
James Cameron:
That would be a fantasy. That would be my fantasy outcome, absolutely.

Charlie Rose:
That would be what you’d like to see?
James Cameron:
That’s the best possible outcome because it’s — because I know how hard my team worked and how much they would — how proud they would be of that accolade, you know what I mean? And look, for myself, I have already got an Oscar. I’ve got a couple of them, you know. And I respect the whole institution of the Academy Awards because it’s so — it’s the pinnacle of achievement in my chosen profession. But I don’t really need another one. But to be honored — you know, to have the team honored and for their accomplishment, that would mean so much to them. And I think that would be the fantasy outcome in all of this.

Charlie Rose:
So you’re saying to the voters, please take a look at my team and go for us as best picture. But –
James Cameron:
Yeah, and I –
Charlie Rose:
– go for Kathryn Bigelow for best director.
James Cameron:
I mean, all I can say is that that would make me very happy if that — you know, I don’t want to try to get –

Charlie Rose:
Happier than if it was best director for James Cameron?
James Cameron:
Honestly, yes.
Charlie Rose:
I believe you.
James Cameron:
Absolutely. I mean, I just think she’s worked so hard for so long. And there’s something very irresistible about the idea of a woman finally being anointed in that role. It’s ridiculously long overdue. And she, of course, would reject that being a woman should have anything to do with it.

[Transcript from ‘The Charlie Rose Show’ via HuffPo]

So at least we know Cameron gets along with at least one of his ex-wives… although bat-sh-t crazy Linda Hamiliton thinks they still get along too. Just sayin’. I do think it’s high time a woman won Best Director, but I fear the backlash against Bigelow if she wins, especially because it’s such a small film. I tend to think Cameron worries about a backlash against her too, and that’s why he’s coming out ahead of the Oscars to tell the industry that he’ll support her victory if it happens. Which is extremely classy, I think.

James Cameron at the Santa Barbara Film Festival on February 6, 2010. Bigelow on Valentine’s Day in Beverly Hills. Credit: WENN.

This is a very, very long story from The Daily Mail, so if you’d like to read the full piece, I’d suggest you go the Daily Mail’s site. I’m just going to do the highlights, which are still pretty f-cking epic. So, Avatar director James Cameron is on his fifth marriage (to Suzy Amis). One of his ex-wives is Kathryn Bigelow, who, like Cameron, is up for the Best Director Oscar for her work on The Hurt Locker. That little side-drama is pretty good, but apparently one of Cameron’s other ex-wives was feeling left out. That ex-wife? Linda Hamilton.

CB wanted me to mention that Linda Hamilton has talked about her marriage to James Cameron before, and discussed in the context of her bipolar disorder. I remember vaguely some of the interviews Linda did many years ago, where she slammed Cameron over and over. So, some of this may be old news, but I think some of it is new. The basic gist of the interview is that Linda Hamilton doesn’t give a f-ck, she can’t stand Suzy Amis, and she wants the whole world to know that James Cameron is really, really screwed up about women. Shocking!

James Cameron may be in line for nine Oscars for his record-breaking movie Avatar, to add to the 11 he won for Titanic, but will they make him happy? Actress Linda Hamilton, one of his four ex-wives, says the trouble with Cameron is that he always wants what he can’t have – at least as far as women are concerned.

‘The woman he can’t get is always his dream girl,’ she says. ‘Work and women go hand in hand for Jimbo, and I should know.’

While he was making Titanic, and living with Linda, he fell for Suzy Amis, who had a small part in the movie. Later, torn between the two, he left Amis, went back to Hamilton and married her. The marriage lasted just eight months before he went back to Amis; she is still with him and they have a son and two daughters. But now, 11 years after they split, Linda believes she’s got him exactly where she wants him.

‘It’s interesting because while he was making Titanic, Suzy at that time was the gargoyle on the end of my bed, waiting to swoop in. Now I’m the gargoyle on her bed because for Jim, the one who doesn’t end up with him is always the one he wants. I’m the one who got away, and she has to live with that.’

Of course, there is, too, the ever-present shadow of his third wife, director Kathryn Bigelow, whose nine Oscar nominations this week for the Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker include a direct challenge to him for the best director award.

‘Yes,’ squeals Linda, now 53, in her sexy gravelly voice. ‘Don’t forget Kathryn!’

The first thing that Kathryn did after being asked to direct The Hurt Locker was to show her ex-husband the script. He urged her to go for it – although it’s doubtful that he envisaged they would end up competing head to head for the same Oscars.

‘Titanic was the most painful thing in the world,’ says Linda. ‘But this wasn’t because Jim was cheating on me. Jim went off with Suzy because we were taking a break from each other and he was free to go with her. It was a painful time because we’d had a relationship where I’d push him away, then he’d push me away. Frankly, most of our relationship was us taking a big break.’

‘It was a crazy time, too, because we clashed as I was prepared to stand up to him. I’d say: “I’m never going to consider going back with you, plus I’m going to tell my friends all about you.” Then when he got together with Suzy I changed my mind and he came back to me and we got married. Then he felt terrible about what he’d done to her and went back to her. Yes, there was a period when he did sort of cross over because he was confused.’

Does it still rankle because Linda was the loser? ‘One does want to win, of course, but I’ve known for many years that this was the very best way to work it. I’m the one that got away and she has to live with that and share him with me.’

It’s a fact that Cameron himself has an extraordinary capacity for remaining on good terms with his ex-wives. There are still family Christmases with Cameron at Linda’s Malibu home where all the ex-wives and extra children gather. Does Suzy cope well with this? Linda, anxious not to be indiscreet but irreverent enough to say it anyway, silently mouths a big ‘no-no’ and indicates that Suzy clearly dislikes her.

‘But she doesn’t have the option of not having me in her life, so we all have to manage,’ she says, her voice rising in passion.

Avatar, released in the UK in December, is the highest-earning film in cinema history, with global box office takings already passing $1.85 billion. Before it opened, it was rumoured that the film – nicknamed Dancing With Smurfs – was likely to be the most expensive flop in cinematic history. But now Avatar is set to sweep the Oscars. This comes as a bit of a surprise even to Linda because she couldn’t share his vision when they pored over the script together 14 years ago.

‘I read Avatar while we were married and I said nothing. I didn’t think it was rubbish, and I’d say to him: “Oh, that’s good, honey.” But it’s not like I thought it was amazing, because clearly Jimbo had a vision and I couldn’t translate the depth and scale to foresee it. This movie is above and beyond.’

[From The Daily Mail]

There’s a lot (SO MUCH) more at the Mail, so if you liked this, you should check it out. Quite honestly, after I read the whole piece, I came away feeling like Linda Hamilton is still very, very much in love with Cameron. I also think she’s a bit of a hypocrite to push Suzy Amis’s face in everything, considering James Cameron left Kathryn Bigelow for Linda, then left Linda for Suzy. Try as she might, Linda still doesn’t sound “over it” even 12 years later.

Linda Hamilton in London on February 4, 2010. Credit: WENN