Each year the Oscars have a theme. Admittedly most of the time the theme is Sobbing Millionaires, so nobody really notices.

But not this year. This year it looks like the main Oscars theme will be Whatever You Do, Don’t Piss James Cameron Off. One movie producer has already been banned from the Oscars for badmouthing Avatar in an email, and now Sacha Baron Cohen has also been told to stay away because his planned Avatar skit might have ended up offending James Cameron.

Not that James Cameron minds. In fact, he’s said that he’d love the Oscars to poke fun at Avatar. Obviously the people responsible for the poking will never work in Hollywood again, and their house might mysteriously burn down in the middle of the night, and all the food they eat afterwards might taste a bit like poison, but that’s all part of the fun, isn’t it?

This might not be especially obvious – what with Avatar quite clearly being a hilarious satire of movies that go out of their way to clumsily moralise about badly-defined issues at every turn and directors who are so in love with themselves that they absolutely lose the ability to self-edit – but James Cameron isn’t exactly known for his sense of humour. We know – it’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Especially with that weird Helen Mirren haircut he’s growing at the moment.

One person who knows about James Cameron’s inability to laugh at himself, though, is Oscars producer Bill Mechanic. He was the boss of 20th Century Fox during the production of Titanic, so he’s probably witnessed enough examples of James Cameron’s self-important megalomania to know better than to jerk him around on Sunday night. That could be why a producer of The Hurt Locker has been banned from the ceremony following an email he wrote about why Avatar shouldn’t win anything. And it’s probably why Sacha Baron Cohen has been uninvited as well.

If reports are to be believed, Sacha Baron Cohen was due to present an Oscar with Ben Stiller on Sunday dressed up as a Na’vi who James Cameron had knocked up on the sly. But producers got cold feet, began to worry that Cameron would stand up midway through the skit and shout “How dare you belittle my masterpiece about the lanky, blue, magic-haired, pterodactyl-riding Jesus alien!” before storming out, and quietly dropped it from the schedule.

But James Cameron says that he knows nothing about the skit. In fact, he says that he’d love it if Avatar got a great big roasting from the Oscars. E! Online reports:

“I don’t know anything about that…I don’t produce the Oscars. If they want to poke fun at Avatar Sunday, that’s OK by me,” said Cameron, “I’m sure we’ll laugh.” As far as he’s concerned, he told me, jokes are just another element of Hollywood’s big night. And he’s fine with it. “The Oscars are a celebration of movies… even the gaffes and out-of-bounds stuff are all part of the fun.”

You hear that, Oscars? James Cameron says that it’s all part of the fun. Now you’ve got two days to bring back everything you banned. Let the Hurt Locker producer attend the ceremony, fly Sacha Baron Cohen in from London to do his Na’vi bit, reinsert all the Avatar jokes into Steve Martin‘s monologue, rehire the naked blue Avatar dancers you hired to entertain the audience during the commercial breaks and dig out that picture of James Cameron’s face with the word ‘SUBTLETY’ written across it that you’d planned to include in the annual montage of people that have died.

He’ll love it. No, really, he said so.

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