During Monday's 82nd Academy Awards, many people were wondering if James Cameron will score another historic feat in "Avatar" the way he did with “Titanic.”

Well, he didn't. This year's biggest winner at the Oscars was its biggest rival “The Hurt Locker” which won “Best Picture” and “Best Director.”

Nowadays, the only question in those people's minds is: What went wrong, "Avatar?"

Hollywood film critics have these theories on how the U.S. bomb squad upset the Na’vis:

“Avatar” elicits fears that actors may soon be “digitally wiped out.”

Los Angeles Times writer Patrick Goldstein said that the Oscars remains as a traditional institution which still has its reservations in honoring films which are seemingly dependent on digital technology.

“Academy members still find it difficult to believe that films largely created and sculpted in the computer--whether it's ‘Avatar’ or the long string of brilliant Pixar films -- can be just as worthy and artistic as the old-fashioned live-action ones,” he wrote.

Cameron made use of an innovation called “performance capture,” were facial expressions of the actors are captured digitally. However, this fusion of live-action and computer-generated (CG) effects is deemed as “threat” to real actors, journalist Jeff Wells said, fearing that “they’re going to be digitally wiped out in the future.”

Albeit the director has seriously campaigned to convince academy voters to see past the use of computer animation, Yahoo! Movies’ Mike Ryan contend that “it seems no one likes the idea of being replaced by a machine.”

Sci-fi films usually get Academy snub

Never mind that your film is the biggest budgeted of all time (more than $230 million). Never mind that it toppled “Titanic” as the highest grossing film of all time (at $2.5 billion worldwide).

Truth is, according to Ryan, sci-fi films hardly score a chance to win the “Oscar gold.” The only exception was “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” back in 2003. And it’s actually more fantasy-epic than it is science fiction.

In the 82 years of Oscars’ existence, only two other films have been nominated: “Star Wars” and “E.T.” (Extraterrestrial).

Still, Cameron may have failed to fully regain his throne as “King of the World,” but “Avatar” took home three trophies out of nine nominations: Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects.

It’s a political film

Seemingly, the release of “Avatar” is “bad timing,” as “this appeared to be a season where the Academy decided that they were going to keep politics off the front burner," Big Hollywood editor John Nolte told MTV News. The epic movie, with its plot centering on humans mining a world named Pandora for a mineral called unobtanium at the expense of that world's nature-loving tribe, is seen as a political reflection of America’s incursion on Iraq.

Said Goldstein, “Its Oscar candidacy, propelled by its phenomenal commercial success, transformed it into a hot-button political tract, with liberals embracing its environmental message and conservatives lambasting it for what they saw as anti-military and often anti-American themes.”

Goldstein believes that the “Hurt Locker,” which won a total of six awards including “Best Picture” and “Best Director” for Kathryn Bigelow---the first woman ever to achieve so in the Academy history---serves as a “striking reminder” that those who best exhibit “quality and craft” will be rewarded. It doesn’t matter how much financial investment and return they have.

In conclusion, the award-giving body remains a relevant bar-setter and a cultural indicator.

“Films that win Oscars don't change history. But they do often echo the shifts in our culture, telling us if we were in a mood to engage or to escape, reminding us of what kind of stories cast the strongest spell on our imagination. It's almost as if the Oscars offer a shadow history of our popular entertainment, some years rewarding films with a somber message, other years rewarding movies that simply provide an inspired escape into another world,” he said.