You saw Avatar didn’t you? Every single human on Earth saw it! And most likely, you walked out thinking that it was a pretty rubbish film, but the 3D was pretty cool. Sadly, 3D can only add depth to the image and not the plot. But still. It was fun to gawp at Sigourney Weaver’s really wide back.

Well, we can be underwhelmed all over again, with the added bonus of being kinda bored by 3D trickery, as the release dates for the new Avatar films have been announced!

Of course, in an attempt to make you click bits of our site, we’ll reveal the dates over the jump. If we told you here, you’d simply walk away without reading all the pointless padding we stick in these mediocre articles.

The first sequel to blockbuster smash will be released in December 2014 (just in time for Christmas) with a second to follow 12 months later (just in time for a different Christmas), 20th Century Fox has announced.

James Cameron has to start working on the scripts soon and will apparently start writing early next year. He says that the films will be “self-contained stories that also fulfil a greater story arc”.

“We will not back off the throttle of Avatar’s visual and emotional horse-power.”

Of course, just like the first film, the Avatar sequels will be set on the distant moon of Pandora and will be shot in 3D. And filled with cutesy hippie rubbish and some trees being exploded.

Basically, it’ll be like the Ewok bits of the Star Wars films if they were filmed through the body scanners they have in airports now.

In a news release, the Oscar-winning director said the sequels would “continue to explore its themes and characters, which touched the hearts of audiences in all cultures around the world”.

Touched hearts? hecklerspray fell asleep in the first one.

He added that he was “looking forward to returning to Pandora, a world where our imaginations can run wild.”

Running wild should be replaced with… er… swimming wild as Cameron has already stated his intention to set some of the sequels’ action in the moon’s oceans.

Everyone hates water levels on computer games, so he better be careful.

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People have run out of ideas about how to fix the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. That said, they only ever had one idea.

Golf balls. Apparently golf balls don’t fix environmental catastrophes. Who knew? But anyway, now that the lack of a solution has become equally disastrous and embarrassing, the authorities have decided to call in the big guns. That’s right, James Cameron is on the case.

No, not a world-class environmental scientist called James Cameron. James Cameron James Cameron. The Avatar guy. He knows exactly how to repair the broken pipeline because he owns some submarines and he knows a lot about underwater stuff. Or, failing that, he can just plug the hole with his increasingly berserk Helen Mirren haircut. Either way, he’s our new hero!

Because he made an excessively expensive Leonardo DiCaprio snuff film and a really long PlayStation cutscene about a blue hippy with penises in his hair, James Cameron doesn’t really have to give anything back to humanity. But if you cut James Cameron open, he bleeds love. And that’s why he’s helping scientists come up with a way to fix the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. It’s not just because he made two and a half films about some water once and now thinks he’s a poxy expert about it, you cynics.

Why did it take so long for the authorities to call upon James Cameron to help with the oil spill? Simple, it’s because they were saving his expertise for when the evil murder-robots from the future attack us. But in the short-term, the oil spill is probably a bit more urgent. People reports:

James Cameron, the director of Avatar and Titanic, joined scientists and other experts at a meeting with U.S. officials Tuesday in Washington to come up with possible fixes for the leak, which so far has resisted oil company BP’s attempts to plug it… Cameron reportedly contacted BP several weeks ago and offered the company use of his private fleet of deep-dive craft.

That’s… that’s actually quite considerate. Well done James Cameron. And he’s not the only celebrity to offer his help, either. Victoria Principal from Dallas has contributed $200,000 towards the clean-up fund, while Kevin Costner has apparently invested in the development of  a brand-new centrifugal clean-up machine. The only problem there is that Kevin Costner is thought to have stipulated that the machine must be 400 metres tall, made of gold and shaped like Kevin Costner, so it probably won’t be much use.

Apart from that, though, it’s a nice thought.

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Now that it’s April, we don’t have to remember anything about what happened at The Oscars, and it’s beautiful.

We don’t have to remember the winners. We don’t have to remember the forced stage banter. In fact, aside from the speech where Sandra Bullock praised her husband without realising that he’d been secretly boning a tattooed Nazi fetishist on the sly, we don’t remember a single thing about The Oscars at all. But Sigourney Weaver does.

Sigourney Weaver remembers that her film Avatar hardly won any Oscars, even though it was prettier than everything else, more technologically advanced than anything else and had about 30 more offensive blue Jesus-aliens in it than anything else. Why does Sigourney Weaver think that Avatar fared so miserably at The Oscars – simple, it’s because James Cameron doesn’t have a vagina. Obviously.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is undoubtedly one of the most sexist institutions around. Why, Halle Berry‘s Oscar win for Monster’s Ball in 2002 marked the first time that the Best Actress award had ever been given to a woman – up until that point the recipients were all men in drag. Yes, even Gwyneth Paltrow.

You just have to look at the Oscar statue itself to see how sexist the Academy is – it obviously looks like a man. If there was any justice in the world then each Oscar would have giant boobs and a working vagina – and there’d be a Best Ironing category near the start of the ceremony – but oh no, the rich old men in charge don’t want to give the sisterhood that sort of helping hand.

Sure, Kathryn Bigelow may have made history by becoming the first ever woman to win a Best Director Oscar this year – but don’t you see? That’s even more sexist than anything else! No, really, it is… because, um, Kathryn Bigelow is a woman and, um, letting women receive the same treatment as men is, you know, wrong. And stuff. Wait. Maybe we need Sigourney Weaver to come in and help us out here.

She’s worked it all out. You see, even though it’s officially the most successful theatrically-released PlayStation cut-scene to heavily imply that Native Americans were stupid and useless until white people came along ever, Sigourney Weaver’s film Avatar was largely blanked at the Oscars in favour of Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. The reason for this, as Sigourney Weaver told Brazilian news site Folha Online, is because of good old-fashioned sexism. WP reports:

The reason Cameron lost is because the Academy was more interested in making history by giving the award to a woman. “Jim didn’t have breasts, and I think that was the reason,” she 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.

We’re right behind you on this issue, Sigourney, and we’ll do anything we can to spread this message. Give equality to women by never letting them win anything! Remove the female vote! Down with girls! Down with girls!

That was your point, Sigourney? Right?

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Last night’s Oscars set up a number of rivalries – Sandra Bullock vs Meryl Streep, Steve Martin vs Alec Baldwin.

Crippling tedium vs wanting to shoot yourself in the mouth. But perhaps the biggest Oscars rivalry of them all was Avatar vs The Hurt Locker. One a low-budget issue-led drama about modern warfare, the other the world’s most expensive PS3 cutaway scene. One a commercial juggernaut, the other a flop. One directed by a woman, the other directed by a man with woman’s hair, which is more or less the same thing. Which film would emerge from the Oscars triumphant?

Turns out it was The Hurt Locker. So, you know, it’s probably time to start pretending that you’ve already seen it and stuff.

Chances are you’ve probably already seen some footage from the Oscars by now. And, if not, maybe you followed one of the billion Oscars liveblogs that just about every website on the face of the planet decided to run last night. And, if not, maybe you’ve read stories about it in newspapers or heard your colleagues talking about it. But if none of that applies to you, hey, we’re here. And if you’re primarily getting your Oscars news from us, you have every reason to feel utterly ashamed of yourself.

But nevertheless, here’s a whistlestop rundown of all the major Oscar winners from last night. Just in case you haven’t already seen them. But you have. We honestly don’t know why we bother sometimes.

Best Supporting Actor – Christoph Waltz, for the uncannily accurate German accent he trained so hard to nail in Inglourious Basterds.

Best Supporting Actress – Mo’Nique, which means she’ll have to gradually start phasing her surname into the credits of her future movies, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson-style, because she’s a real actress now.

Best Actor – Jeff Bridges, not because Crazy Heart is very good – because it really isn’t – but because he grew a beard and he probably won’t get nominated ever again after appearing in that bloody Tron film.

Best Actress – Sandra Bullock, who couldn’t really cry very convincingly during her acceptance speech, probably because she’s had her face surgically tightened to such an absurd degree that her tear ducts are now located just behind her ears.

Best Picture – The Hurt Locker, a magical futuristic yarn about the peace-loving Na’vi race and their fight against colonisation by… oh, no, whoops, it’s the one about explosions and people looking sad. Sorry. Poor old James Cameron, eh?

Best Director – Kathryn Bigelow, who became the first woman to ever win an Oscar ever. No woman has ever won an Oscar before, not even in any of the 81 previous Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories. Truly, Kathryn Bigelow is a visionary and a pioneer. Her acceptance speech was probably about periods or how much she likes eating cake or something. We weren’t really listening.

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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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It’s the Oscars on Sunday! Excited? No, us neither! It’s basically a big smug party that we’ll never be invited to.

But it could be worse. We could be Nicolas Chartier. As a producer of The Hurt Locker, the Oscars were supposed to be Nicolas Chartier’s moment of glory – when his little film could finally beat the odds and be recognised as the cinematic masterpiece that it is. He’d get to hold the Oscar high above his head, express his gratitude to millions of people and then go off to a glitzy afterparty where he could spend hour after hour trying to look down Kate Winslet‘s top.

But that’s not to be. You see, Nicolas Chartier has become the first ever Oscar nominee to be banned from the ceremony, and all because he wrote a silly email that slagged off Avatar. Whoops.

You don’t have to be too much of a genius to work out what’ll happen at Sunday’s Oscars. First, a bunch of millionaires will canter up and down a red carpet in impractical eveningwear, stopping only to tell Ryan Seacrest how blessed they feel. Then Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin will open the show by delivering some creaky patter in the vain hope that they’ll be able to replicate their chemistry from That Meryl Streep Film That They Were Both In But Nobody Watched. And then, approximately 18 hours after the whole thing started, the Best Picture Oscar will be handed out.

And it’ll be won by either Avatar or The Hurt Locker. The two films couldn’t be more different, though. One was made on the cheap, the other cost an offensively large amount of money. One is about real events happening in the real world, the other is about a silly blue Jesus with magical hair. One is the most successful movie ever made, the other was seen by about three people, each of whom all wear sandals for a living. And one will be represented by its full spectrum of producers at the Oscars, but the other one won’t.

That’s because Hurt Locker producer Nicolas Chartier has been banned from attending the Oscars, all because he emailed some people asking them to vote for The Hurt Locker. The Miami Herald reports:

The decision comes on the heels of Chartier sending an e-mail message to a group of colleagues that included academy members asking them to choose “The Hurt Locker” for best picture and “not the $500-million film” – a clear reference to “Avatar.” The message was deemed in violation of the academy’s ban against creating a negative impression of a rival nominee.

Well we hope Nicolas Chartier has learnt his lesson – soliciting for Oscar votes is fundamentally wrong. Unless, you know, you’re buying up endless amounts of space in trade magazines for a For Your Consideration campaign so desperate-looking that you may as well just staple a wad of cash to each ad and be done with it. That’s OK. But not emailing. No.

Oh, we kid. Nicolas Chartier has been banned from the Oscars because he was mean about Avatar. Which probably means we’ll never get an invitation to the Oscars either. But never mind – at least we know that Nicolas Chartier will be watching The Oscars in the same way we will on Sunday – at home, crying. To be fair, he’ll be crying because he was banned and we’ll be crying because somewhere down the line our lives went wrong and now we have to watch the poxy Oscars every bloody year. But that’s more or less the same thing, right?

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Let’s play a game. Imagine Avatar. Imagine everything you liked about Avatar. Now remove all the 3D.

Now remove the breathtaking visuals. Now remove all the nuanced motion capture performances, the emotive score, the cutting-edge technology and the spectacle of seeing a perfectly-realised alien world come to life in such perfect detail that you secretly wished you live there. You’ve got a slightly gormless environmental story about a lanky blue Jesus who flies around on a pterodactyl having it off with tentacly aliens all the time.

Or you’ve got the Avatar prequel novel that James Cameron wants to write. It doesn’t matter which; they’re just as rubbish-sounding as each other.

There’s no doubt that Avatar was a cinematic game-changer. In the near future, we’re going to be bombarded by hundreds of films that’ll pinch elements from Avatar and claim it as their own. Maybe we’ll see more films embrace digital 3D. Or maybe we’ll see more films experiment with motion capture technology. Or maybe we’ll start to see less of a reliance on flesh and blood actors in the filmmaking process. Who knows?

But what we’re hoping, though – what we’re really hoping – is that Avatar influences other directors to the degree that, once they’ve made their film, they feel compelled to rush out and bang together a bloated, badly-formed, utterly superfluous 900-page novel about the world that they’ve created. Because that’s what James Cameron has decided to do with Avatar. Look, MTV says so and everything:

“Jim is going to write a novel himself,” the film’s producer, Jon Landau, told us. “Jim wants to write a novel that is a big, epic story that fills in a lot of things… it would go into much more depth about all the stories that we didn’t have time to deal with — like the schoolhouse and Sigourney [Weaver's character] teaching at the schoolhouse; Jake on Earth and his backstory and how he came here.”

Oh gee, why not throw in a scene where Colonel Quaritch catches Jake towelling down after a shower and they end up bumming each other in slow-motion to the sound of I Want To Know What Love Is while riding a rainbow-coloured unicorn? Because, you know, if James Cameron wants to have a go at writing some Avatar fan fiction, he may as well go the whole hog.

Seriously, James. Enough’s enough. You’ve already made a three-hour film about the world of Avatar. We don’t need a book to fill in the gaps on top of that. Learn to self-edit. Because you know who you’re starting to sound like? George Lucas. Once you start writing books and entertaining the possibility of sequels, you won’t be able to stop. You’ll start chucking out Avatar spin-offs and cartoons and holiday specials and weird disco-influenced musicals starring Donny and Marie Osmond with barely a hint of quality control.

And you know how this’ll end? With a terrible Avatar prequel that’ll largely revolve about trade negotiation and taxation banding within Pandora’s bureaucratic infrastructure, that’s how. Worse still, you might end up growing a beard and refusing to wear anything but plaid shirts until your neck disappears completely. Honestly James. Put down the pen while you still can.

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High and low tide.

Folded:

• Vanilla Ice (finally found a way to be the coolest guy in the room)
• A nice lady called Amy Walker doing accents (the South Carolina is darling, darling)
• The Cleveland Show (plush Stewie’s getting so old. Let’s get that cute Cleveland Jr in all the card shops now)
• Macgruber (“I’m a three wire guy”)
• Luke’s regret (just don’t think about it for too long)

Creased:

• Cinemas still packed with people seeing Avatar for the first time (if you haven’t seen it by now, don’t bother. Even watching Peter Andre explode after waiting this long would be disappointing)
• Bioshock 2 (more of the same but without the storyline. They didn’t up their game enough)
• Nicola Roberts (taken it upon herself to speak out against tanning by looking like an 18th century courtesan)
• St Valentine’s Day (designed to shove ‘ooh, we’re in a couple and you’re not’ in every single person’s face. Kinda like if there was a St Wealthy Day where rich people taunted us with bags of money and then burnt them all)
• John Terry (all he needs now is a license to kill)

You know, many people were expecting Avatar to be top of the weekend box office until the end of time.

After all, it had everything. Guns, explosions, robots, sexy lady aliens with boobs, you name it. However, here’s where the people got it wrong – it’s only boys who like that stuff. Girls like different things. Girls like sensitive boys and crying and scenes of sensitive boys kissing crying girls on construction sites in rainstorms. And where was all that in Avatar? Nowhere, that’s where.

And that’s why the new weekend box office number one is Dear John, which is either the greatest movie ever made or an awful piece of crap, depending on how many fallopian tubes you own.

Gentleman, consider this advance warning. Remember The Notebook? Remember how you were forced to watch The Notebook once, and your girlfriend wouldn’t stop crying all the way through it and it was basically so insufferable that you felt like crawling through the screen and trying to drown Ryan Gosling? Remember how you made a mental promise to yourself never to watch another film like The Notebook again? Well Dear John is almost identical to The Notebook, so make yourself busy until it’s not on in cinemas any more. And then destroy your DVD player.

Unless we’ve told you too late. Dear John has become the first movie for months to take more money than Avatar at the weekend box office, so it’s fairly likely that a number of boys have already been tricked into watching it. We give these men out sympathies. Everyone else, consider this weekend box office top five advance warning…

1 - Dear John (Now we’re not saying that Dear John is the worst kind of painfully emotional female film, or that any man who was involved in its production should be ashamed, but Channing Tatum did try to burn his cock off immediately after making it. Just saying) $32,400,000

2 - Avatar (James Cameron shouldn’t be sad that Avatar is no longer the weekend box office number one. At least it’s made so much money that he can afford a haircut now. Seriously James Cameron, cut your hair. You’re starting to look like Helen Mirren) $23,600,000

3 - From Paris With Love (John Travolta shaves his head and fires a bazooka. Judging by the past, this means that at some point over the next couple of years, The Rock will make a film where he shaves his head and fires a bazooka) $8,120,000

4 - Edge of Darkness (Interesting. Mel Gibson calling someone an asshole on live TV didn’t make anyone flock to see Edge Of Darkness. This doesn’t bode well for the ‘Shitmuncher’ press tour that he’s planning for his next film, does it?) $7,005,000

5 - The Tooth Fairy (Seriously The Rock, that bald-headed bazooka movie can’t come quickly enough) $6,500,000

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This week’s good and bad for oh-so-fun February.

Folded:

• Peter Serafinowicz does the iPad (hiccup inducing funny as always)
• Zoe Saldana (c’mon, they should have at least nominated her)
• The Wolfman (looks good if nothing else)
• Innocent smoothies (not cheap0, but healthy and, let’s face it, you get what you pay for)
• Cobie Smulders (right up there with Sophie Okonedo for the Coolest Name in Acting award)

Creased:

• Feeling stupid for bad-mouthing Avatar after that first trailer came out (good job no-one was listening)
• Why does deodorant smell really nice when you first start using it then goes all gassy by the end? (it’s a mystery is what it is)
• Coming of Age (either we’re too old for this or it’s too damn terrible)
• Running an iPod Touch for a week without something going wrong (wi-fi goes loopy, apps vanish and the back gets all smudgy)
• Ted Mosby (this character has no redeeming features whatsoever. Even Matthew in Game On is less of a self-important twit)

So now it’s official. Avatar is the biggest film of all time, unless of course you’re accounting for inflation.

Because then it’s Gone With The Wind. But, hey, even when you account for inflation Avatar is still the 26th biggest movie of all time. The 26th biggest movie! That’s awesome, Avatar! Why, that makes you almost as good as… oh, Grease. Well, never mind. At least you’re beating Shrek 2. Just about.

Why are we telling you this? Because Avatar is still the number one movie at the weekend box office, and we’ve completely run out of things to say about it. You’d better hope that it’s not top of the weekend box office next week, because if it is we’re going to use this space to discuss our ingrown toenail in unnecessary detail.

Oh Avatar, what have you done? You’ve been number one at the weekend box office for so long that George Lucas has started to pay attention. Now it’s been announced that he wants to re-do all his old Star Wars films in digital 3D to cash-in on Avatar‘s success. Wonderful. This probably means that we’ll have to put up with new scenes of Chewbacca plugging his hair into Harrison Ford‘s bum or Alec Guinness having a fistfight with Michelle Rodriguez. In short – we hate you, Avatar.

Still, here’s the US weekend box office top five:

1 - Avatar (Of course, if Sex And The City 2 was to overtake Avatar as the biggest movie of all time this summer, George Lucas would probably feel the need to make a SATC-influenced edition of Star Wars as well. It’d be awesome – especially since half of the Sex And The City cast are already starting to look a bit like Yoda anyway) $30,000,000

2 - Edge Of Darkness (Where Mel Gibson takes revenge for the death of his daughter, probably by shouting drunken abuse at a synagogue for half an hour and then wandering off to go to the toilet. We haven’t seen it, but that would make the most sense) $17,120,000

3 - When In Rome (We always thought that the phrase was ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’. But apparently we were wrong. Apparently the phrase appropriated by Robert Burton in 1621 for his book The Anatomy Of Melancholy, based on advice given to St Augustine by bishop of Milan St Ambrose, in 387 AD, was ‘When in Rome, make a shitty, hopelessly contrived, by-the-numbers tenth-rate rom-com’. Who knew?) $12,065,000

4 - The Tooth Fairy (Because we honestly can’t think of any kind of pithy comment to go here, here’s an anagram of The Tooth Fairy – Hairy Heft Toot. Happy now?) $10,000,000

5 - The Book Of Eli (A film about a bible-quoting lunatic. You get the feeling that if this was remade today, Stephen Baldwin would probably play the lead. Which would make it about 50 times better than it currently is, obviously) $8,770,000

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OK Avatar, you’ve had your fun. Avatar has been top of the weekend box office forever now, but enough’s enough.

You can stop now. Because, sure, Avatar is all pretty and inoffensive and broadly spiritual and all that nonsense, but this week you all went to see Avatar instead of Legion – a film about a swearing old lady turning into a giant spider and crawling across the ceiling of a diner until a man blasts her down with a shotgun. It’s a film about Paul Bettany trying to kill God with a machine gun, for crying out loud.

And yet you all went to see Avatar, a film about a forest that lights up like a Samsung HD TV commercial, instead. You people, honestly.

Here’s our problem with Avatar. When a film reaches the top of the weekend box office, it deserves praise. Even more so when it remains at the top of the weekend box office for a second week. Three weeks and it’s a sensation. Four weeks and it’s a phenomenon. But when a film has been weekend box office number for as long as Avatar, it means one thing – that people are watching it again and again. This is undoubtedly a bad sign.

There’s already a preposterously detailed Wikipedia page about the Na’vi language. And soon there’ll be Avatar conventions, where people dressed up like streaky Blue Man Group outcasts will argue ferociously with one another about the atomic density of Unobtainium while Zoe Saldana quietly curses the fact that she agreed to star in Avatar and a Star Trek movie in the background. It’s going to be appalling, and we’re blaming you for this.

But anyway, here’s the US weekend box office top five…

1 - Avatar (Of course, one of the reasons why Avatar is so successful is because of all the religious overtones it contains. For instance, our favourite part of the bible is the bit where Jesus rides a massive pterodactyl and everyone beats the shit out of the giant robot, so imagine how delighted we were to see that recreated onscreen) $36,000,000

2 - Legion (Seriously, though. How can you have seen the Legion trailer and still decided to watch Avatar? Look at it! An ice cream man turns into a demon and another man gets strapped to an upside-down crucifix and explodes in a giant ball of pus! You people.) $18,200,000

3 - The Book Of Eli (A bit like Legion, except no old ladies turn into spiders so there’s no real reason for you to watch it) $17,000,000

4 - The Tooth Fairy (Imagine if The Rock was the tooth fairy! Wouldn’t that be hilarious? Apparently not, no) $14,500,000

5 - The Lovely Bones (We’ve long held the belief that the fatter Peter Jackson is, the better his films are. With this in mind, we get the feeling that The Lovely Bones was made on a diet of Ryvita and tap water) $8,800,000

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Some say that Avatar will soon become the most popular movie of all time – but not if China has its way.

To China, Avatar is a threat. Chinese authorities have grown displeased at the central message of Avatar – which is either ‘the white man will save you, primitive savages’ or ‘all white men are evil’ or ‘nature is beautiful’ or ‘it’s fun to spiritually connect with horses by shoving your hair up their bum’ – and have started to ban it from cinemas.

But it’s too late. Avatar‘s cultural revolution will not be stopped. Now, switched on by Avatar, millions of Chinese people are furious that their government is standing in the way of their God-given right to watch 3D films that are too long and based on hacky Hallmark-style sentiments about woolly, ill-defined spiritualism. And this is how Communism ends.

If we could pick our dream job, it’d probably have to be ruler of China. Seriously, it’d be such a blast – unless we’re mistaken, it doesn’t seem to involve anything more than swanning around the place banning things willy-nilly. Why, in just the last few years China has banned Bjork for being outspoken about Tibet, Jay-Z for being vulgar, The Da Vinci Code for its religious subversion and Sharon Stone because Sharon Stone is a colossal braindead monkey-humper.

And now it’s the turn of Avatar, the film that literally everyone’s calling ‘quite pretty, but a bit too long and probably not as good as something like Spaceballs‘. There’s a possibility that within the next few weeks, Avatar will become – if not the biggest film in history – then certainly the biggest film about a blue Thundercat with magical hair poncing around an enchanted forest. But that hasn’t stopped the Chinese authorities from banning it.

Why? Are the Chinese authorities worried that Avatar‘s radical political message – that being nice to people is quite good – will kickstart a revolution? Were they worried about Avatar‘s pro-smoking agenda? Did they become concerned about intellectual property violations because Avatar‘s giant flying pike thing looked like something that came from one of China’s polluted lakes?

No. The truth is that China only screens 20 non-domestic films a year, and only then for no longer than 10 days at a time. Avatar simply came to the end of its state-regulated run and is being therefore replaced by a domestic movie, which is quite a boring reason, really. Sorry. Still, some Chinese people are awfully narked off about it, as The New York Times reports:

Liu Chang, a 25-year-old marketing coordinator, said protecting the domestic film industry would not make Chinese films more popular. “It is obvious that Chinese movies are not as good as those blockbusters,” she said as she waited for an afternoon showing of “Avatar” in Beijing. “We have to admit this.” The domestic film being released, “Confucius,” is loosely based on the philosopher’s life.

See? What are you Chinese idiots complaining about? You might be missing out of a breathtaking 3D epic that looks set to go down in history as one of the most-watched movies in all of history, but you’re getting a biopic about a beardy old bloke who babbles about etiquette quite a lot. That sounds amazing. Honestly, you Chinese morons don’t even know you’re born.

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OK, sit down. This might come as a shock to some of you. Deep breaths, though – together we can get through this.

It’s about Avatar. Ready? It’s still the weekend box office number one. Yes, we know, it’s still losing ground each week, and on Friday it looked as though it was going to be beaten by The Book of Eli this week. But that was never really going to happen, was it?

Of course not – everyone knows that the hot new weekend box office thing is slightly tedious movies about blue inexplicable Jesus figures. And that’s where The Book Of Eli slipped up – it’s a slightly tedious movie about an inexplicable black Jesus figure. So near and yet so far!

Up until now, there has been a lot of talk about Avatar beating Titanic‘s gross to become the biggest movie of all time. Call us cynical if you like, but we don’t see that happening.

Don’t forget, Titanic had something for everything – namely Kate Winslet‘s boobs and a Leonardo DiCaprio death scene. Meanwhile, what does Avatar have? Michelle Rodriguez in a vest and a sort of Smurf 9/11. That’s fairly niche at best. And don’t forget, Avatar faces stiff weekend box opposition from The House Of Numbers – and nothing’s more popular than numbers and houses, especially when combined in a film that nobody has heard of. Avatar‘s spell at the top could be doomed!

Here’s the weekend box office top five…

1 - Avatar (Avatar is still the weekend box office number one. You know what this means? Maybe stoners really will watch anything) $41,300,000

2 - The Book Of Eli (Now, we should make it perfectly clear that, despite its title, The Book of Eli has no biblical overtones whatsoever. It’s actually a story about a copy of Everybody Poops owned by a man called Eli, who occasionally looks at it and sort of smiles. That’s roughly the long and short of it) $31,615,000

3 - The Lovely Bones (First Peter Jackson adapted a classic novel in Lord Of The Rings. Then he adapted a classic monkey movie in King Kong. Now he’s adapted a slightly less-classic novel in The Lovely Bones. This means that his next movie will be an adaptation of a slightly less-classic monkey movie. May we suggest Dunston Checks In? Thanks awfully) $17,060,000

4 - Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (Dear Firefox built-in spellcheck, please begin to add the word ‘squeakquel’ to your dictionaries. We have a nasty feeling that it isn’t about to go away any time soon) $11,500,000

5 – Sherlock Holmes (Incredibly, despite the outcry over the alleged homosexual content in Sherlock Holmes, there doesn’t appear to be a porno spoof of this movie yet. Not even one called Sherlock Bones. Or one called Spermlock Holmes. Or one called Bumfuck Moans. Seriously, this is why the porn industry is in so much trouble) $9,825,000

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The Golden Globes took place last night, and over the course of the evening there was a little something for everyone.

Like being told what stuff to enjoy? Then you’ll be pleased to know that Avatar, The Hangover, Robert Downey Jr, Meryl Streep and Glee all won awards. Like the old Golden Globes traditions? Then you’ll be pleased to know that the camera kept cutting to Jack Nicholson‘s face, even though he continues his slow transformation into a rascally sphere of pulsating cholesterol.

And then there was the Golden Globes host Ricky Gervais. If you like Ricky Gervais, you’ll be pleased to know that his performance was nothing short of a comic masterclass. Don’t like Ricky Gervais? Then you’ll be pleased to know that he was absolutely rubbish. Apparently.

The Golden Globes has a reputation for being a loosey-goosey cousin to the Oscars. Sure, it might act as an important bellwether for anyone keen on predicting Oscar winners, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously – acceptance speeches are drowned out by the sound of millionaires drinking champagne, Jack Nicholson will inevitably get his bum out and Sharon Stone can often be seen wafting about looking unsure of how to interact with anything. Which tends to be the case anywhere Sharon Stone goes, admittedly, but at the Golden Globes at least she does it in a pretty dress.

But ahead of last night’s Golden Globes, there were two main questions on everybody’s lips – who would win, and would Ricky Gervais be amazing or terrible as host? Let’s address those one at a time.

1 - Avatar ended up winning Best Drama, The Hangover won Best Comedy, Robert Downey Jr won for Sherlock Holmes, Sandra Bullock won for The Blind Side, Jeff Bridges won for Crazy Heart and Meryl Streep won for Julie & Julia. That last prize was in the coveted Boring, Needlessly Complicated Films About Unlikeable People Doing Mediocre Things, Often In A Silly Voice category. Presumably.

2 - He was both.

No, really, Ricky Gervais was amazing and terrible. It just depends who you listen to. Take Radar, for instance – this is how it described Ricky Gervais last night:

British funnyman Ricky Gervais, was on fire Sunday bringing the laughs from the audience with a risque and hilarious introduction, taking time to make digs at NBC and their ongoing Leno/Conan fiasco, a theme of the night at the awards show and on the red carpet.

While ABC, on the other hand, opted for a different stance. Working under the headline Ricky Gervais Falls Flat At Golden Globes, it said:

Gervais’… opening minutes were disappointingly toothless. He tackled predictable subjects: satirizing self-promotion by plugging DVDs for his own creations; tossing off banal generalities about the unimportance of actors; small-penis yuks, and of course, NBC potshots. But Gervais flew through all of them so fast he didn’t land a blow, let alone draw blood.

So there you have it. Ricky Gervais was hilarious and crap at the same time, often during the course of the same joke. So now you know what to say when anybody asks you what you thought of him. Alternatively, you could have just watched the Golden Globes ceremony in its entirety and formed your own opinion about him. But you’re not an animal, are you?

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