The people that think that Avatar should have won anything except for graphic art awards, or CGI effects, don’t know what the Oscar’s are about. The only way they judge 3D is by ticket sales. If 65% of the people saw it in 3D, that says something. Oscar’s are not judged by the number of tickets sold, or money made. 3D is judged by the number of tickets sold and how much money it made. Also, they don’t have any way to count all the people who saw it twice because they loved the 3D so much. 3D is here to stay, and as good as it is, I still hope they make it better.
The 3D of yesterday was a nice gimmick, but nobody wanted to sit through a 2.5 hour movie of it. The #D of today is working very well, and discomfort levels are nearly nonexistent for most people.

The Oscars had absolutely nothing to do with 3D other than maybe the academy voters watch DVDs at home. Next year they can watch at home in 3D and maybe they will appreciate it more.  Avatar is up to what, $2.5 Billion. Money talks - you can complain about it all day long and we all know indies are better stories. But 3D is hot stuff, pulling people off their couches and into spending money.  Of course something like Alice…which 3D’d 2D - and looked cheap, flat with occasional graphic visual attacks -  could really screw up perceptions of quality. I hope that cheap trick goes away.

I think you should be asking, “Will 3D improve poor storytelling?”

I would have been more shocked if it had won best picture.  Keep in mind this is the Oscars, and not the People’s choice awards.  The AMPAS gave it wins in the catagories it deserved, although you might argue whether or not it deserved mixing over The Hurt Locker.  Like Nathan said, the movie plot was hardly original…call it Pocohantas in Space, and it could have been a sequel.

Regardless, I enjoyed the movie, and will purchase the Blu-ray on Mar 22, to re-live Pandora all over again.

Will I replace my blu-ray player and projector to 3D compatible models just to watch Avatar in 3D…no.  I’m not replacing a 6 month old projector, and a 1 year old TV, just for 3D.  If 3D is still the big think 2-3 years down the road, I’ll consider it for my next upgrade.

“Like most people, you were shocked Avatar did not win” the Best Picture Oscar?  Are you kidding me?

I’m sorry, but half of the films running for the award were bettter than Avatar, regardless of the 3D.  I concede that Avatar did one thing really well, perhaps better than any movie has ever done—provide the audience with a sense of place.  Avatar sucked us into its world like no other movie before it, and provided us all with 3 hours of genuine escape.  And it had lots of explosions.

But that’s all it did really well.  Everything else about the movie was pedestrian.  The plot was boring and unoriginal, having been done countless times before in countless movies such as Dances with Wolves and Earnest Goes to Camp.  I knew how it was going to end a third of the way into it.
  The characters were flat, stereotypical and unoriginal.  Other than the fact that some of them were blue, I’d seen their basic personalities in countless movies before.  The ‘sentiment’ was maudlin and hamfisted, made even worse by being doled out by cgi natives who looked and sounded like “Medicine Man” extras in blue face paint.  Even the music was bombastic and forgettable. 
  Don’t get me wrong, Avatar was pretty.  The pinks and blues that dominated the alien world reminded me too much of the early nineties new agey sci-fi art one would find on the cover of paperbacks or those poster kiosks at malls, but even so, the visuals were beautiful.  But to your question as to whether or not AMPAS believes 3D is a passing fad, I think AMPAS was saying that even a cool gimmick like 3D, even done as well as Avatar did it, isn’t enough to save an otherwise flat and hollow film, let alone give it an Oscar.