Avatar... And I say that without having seen it.

James Cameron's 'Avatar,' a mega-budget, 3-D sci-fi adventure that pits humans against humanoid natives on a far-off planet, begins its own adventure at midnight tonight in theaters around the country. Though it is not likely to displace his last film -- the 1997 Oscar-winning Best Picture 'Titanic' -- as history's most popular movie, it is very likely to give Cameron a second Best Picture statuette to go with the first. Avatar... And I say that without having seen it.

James Cameron's 'Avatar,' a mega-budget, 3-D sci-fi adventure that pits humans against humanoid natives on a far-off planet, begins its own adventure at midnight tonight in theaters around the country. Though it is not likely to displace his last film -- the 1997 Oscar-winning Best Picture 'Titanic' -- as history's most popular movie, it is very likely to give Cameron a second Best Picture statuette to go with the first.

I come to this conclusion not just because the movie is receiving ecstatic reviews from both sides of the Atlantic, but because it's getting raves for the things that matter to Academy voters. It has romance, visual sweep, a humanist premise and it's going to make a fortune. More than that, it is being heralded as a technical milestone on the order of the first talking picture and the advents of color, wide-screen, 3-D and computer-generated imagery.

Take this paragraph from today's Los Angeles Times review by veteran critic Kenneth Turan, whose harsh attacks on 'Titanic' prompted Cameron to write a letter to the editor demanding the critic's scalp: "To see 'Avatar' is to feel like you understand filmmaking in three dimensions for the first time. In Cameron's hands, 3-D is not the forced gimmick it's often been, but a way to create an alternate reality and insert us so completely and seemlessly into it that we feel like we've actually been there, not watched it on a screen."

The fact that Turan made these comments in Hollywood's hometown paper is significant. It's widely believed, certainly by Cameron, that Turan's condemnation of the 'Titanic' script prevented the writer-director from adding a screenplay nomination to the film's 14 others. Turan acknowledges in his 'Avatar' review that the new movie contains some of the same 'flat dialogue' and 'obvious characterization' that put him off before, but says 'Avatar's visual powers and the freshness of its other-worldly characters overcomes those objections.



"The film's romantic protagonists ... end up feeling like creatures whose fates we care more about than we did Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet's on the boat," he writes.

The young women moviegoers whose repeat viewings drove 'Titanic' to its $1.8 billion worldwide box office record may disagree with Turan about the allure of Leo and Kate; 'Avatar's' keenest audience is more apt to be young men. And I am not implying that one critic -- even the one best known to L.A.-based Academy members -- can get Cameron re-annointed "King of the World" with one review.

But that review, along with equally laudatory notices in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, do alert Academy voters to a potential milestone movie. The reviews are saying 'Avatar' is an Event not just because of its production costs (perhaps as much as $300 million), or because it's the best damn 3-D movie ever made, but because it also breaks new ground in storytelling and raises the level of wonder among viewers.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences acknowledges technical achievements every year in Oscar presentations held days before the Big Show. And the technical achievements that lead to summer blockbusters year after year are usually acknowledged in the Oscar's craft categories. But when the technical advances fundamentally change the way people think about movies, Academy members want to bookmark the occasion with their highest honors.

Add in an apparently moving love story and an environmental issue that tweaks the liberal conscience, plus the absence of any "typical" Oscar contender, and Cameron will be able to end Oscar night March 7 the way he ended it March 23, 1998, by bellowing, "I am King of the World."

I'll be at the first sceening of 'Avatar' in my neighborhood tomorrow and I'll let you know if I change my mind.