The movie pushes 257 minutes — a mind-numbing length that is, as Cameron put it, “strictly for hyperfans.”

But is this rehashing any surprise?

“Avatar” was bound for milking, with two additional installments, undoubtedly with their own re-releases and myriad Criterion and collector’s editions of Blu-ray discs, which, to the normal person, are indistinguishable. It is, after all, the most lucrative movie of all time. So the sci-fi epic was bound to be a trilogy whether Cameron wanted it or not. Movie executives would be idiots to kill this golden egg-laying goose.

But if there were any doubts, they were dispelled today when Cameron gave the first details on the sequels.

The unnamed “Avatar” 2 and 3 will likely be shot back-to-back, Cameron tells MTV, and he says they won’t hit theaters until at least 2014. Which, for you impatient Avatards, should be tolerable considering the first installment took 15 years from conception to the big screen.

If that’s not enough, Cameron, an avid deep-sea diver, also hinted that the sequel will take place underwater, describing Pandora’s oceans as “equally rich and diverse and crazy and imaginative” as the setting for the first film.

Here’s an interview with Cameron discussing the future “Avatar” films:

An enjoyable blend of sweetness and silliness, with loads of giggles and just enough dark-edged humor to keep the adult companions interested (the Bank of Evil, where Gru seeks financing for his schemes, carries a small-print legend above its grandiose portals: “Formerly Lehman Brothers”), “Despicable Me” ranks as the second-best digital-animated family film of the summer. But when the gold medal belongs to “Toy Story 3,” there’s no shame in that. And unlike every other 3-D film I’ve seen since “Avatar,” this one actually uses the technology with grace, daring and a sense of wonder. After the disgraceful gray smear of “The Last Airbender,” that’s wonderful to see. (Unlike that film, and “Alice in Wonderland,” and 2010′s other “up-converted” films, this one was actually made in 3-D, and the difference is obvious.)

Improbably enough, “Despicable Me” ought to make Universal Pictures an instant player in the realm of family-oriented digital animation, up till now dominated by Pixar and DreamWorks. Mind you, Universal didn’t actually produce this film, but in French animators Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud and their fledgling Illumination Entertainment studio, they picked the right subcontractor. If Coffin and Renaud’s images don’t possess the fanatical level of detail and nuance found in Pixar’s films, they’re clear, brightly colored and often very funny. I’ll never think of the oodgy, slimy Squid Gun, a weapon pioneered by Vector (Jason Segel), Gru’s irritating, über-nerd rival, without chortling.

Furthermore, while “Despicable Me” doesn’t even try for the complicated emotional tone and quasi-Proustian yearning of “Toy Story 3,” its quotient of pure fun is at least as high. There isn’t much doubt, right from the beginning of “Despicable Me,” that Gru’s evilness is highly exaggerated. He’s far too kind to his army of Minions, cute little yellow guys who look like a cross between light bulbs and cough drops, and far too frightened of his own pet, which is never identified but looks something like a furry, terrestrial version of one of those scary, toothy, deep-water fishes. Needless to say, when a trio of orphan girls turns up on his doorstep hawking cookies (their ringleader, preteen Margo, is voiced by Miranda Cosgrove), Gru is absolutely petrified.

It turns out, however that the girls and their baked goods may offer Gru a way into the impregnable fortress of Vector, the spoiled and pompous new-school villain who’s driving old-line entrepreneurs like Gru out of business. There’s a nonsensical story going on here about Gru and Vector’s rival plans to shrink the moon and steal it — Vector’s already got the Great Pyramid of Giza in his yard, painted blue to blend in with the sky — but all of that’s just an enormous MacGuffin. The real story, of course, is about Gru’s not-so-stony heart turning to mush as his utterly cynical adoption of the spunky gals turns into the real thing.

Carell gets a lot of help from Ken Daurio’s consistently amusing script, but he brings tremendous complexity to a character who could easily have been a one-note, Boris-vs.-Bullwinkle gag. Gru constantly marvels at the insipid and hackneyed nature of parental love, but marvels even more at his own inability to resist it. When coerced into reading the girls one of those board books where you stick three fingers into little puppets, to become kittens drinking their milk or brushing their fur or whatever, he exclaims: “This is garbage! You like this?” But by the end of the movie, after the girls and Minions have helped him through a ludicrous lunar showdown with Vector, Gru has written his own icky-cute board book, and a hugely sweet “aww” moment it is too.

Along with Segel as the immensely smug Victor — who gets what’s coming to him, don’t you worry — “Despicable Me” also features Russell Brand, Kirsten Wiig and Julie Andrews (!) in relatively low-impact roles. You can argue that all this movie does is remix a bunch of familiar themes, tropes and gags from other family-oriented films. But Coffin and Renaud’s execution is fresh, sincere, often lovely and a great deal of fun — and in this kind of movie, and this kind of movie summer, execution is everything.

And I very much appreciated the many comments that came in from the readers — including those of one of my most avid readers, who hates everything about me with the kind of passion that can only be love. The various misadventures that went into the creation of “City Island” are by no means unusual in filmmaking — all movies really are well-prepared accidents. Writing about the making of this film gave me perspective on the craft I’ve chosen to pursue and also made me realize how deeply committed anybody who makes a film must be just to follow it through to some sort of completion.

Whenever I’ve wrapped a film, I find it impossible to watch another movie for a while because all I see is the outside of the frame filled with the set and its complications. Unable to lose myself in the story, I can only identify with the director and the difficulty and tedium he or she must have experienced while shooting their movie. I remember turning on “Oliver” shortly after we wrapped “City Island” and watching the “Consider Yourself” number — normally a delightful cinematic treat. All I could think of was the assistant directors and what they had on their hands: Crowds! Kids! Horses! Playback! Oy. I turned it off, grateful to not be on their set in their shoes. You really do think that you might never do it again. And then a few weeks later, the pain has faded and you’re on the phone to your agent.

Such is the life of a film director.

Ever since I was quite young, I was fascinated by directors — not just by the job but by the peculiar combination of qualities that it takes to make up a personality that can actually handle (with enthusiasm) this taxing, strangely addictive profession. I early on began to identify several traits that seemed to unify most directors: they are punctual, rarely late — even the ones that go over schedule and over budget. They are always the ones that end the conversation at hand — they never stay too long at any party. They fear little socially — confidence is essential for the profession. Yet their sociability is highly selective. The charm can be turned on and off at will. Let’s say that they tend to be emotionally efficient. Charm, anger, aloofness, delicacy, friendliness, ruthlessness … these qualities are available at all times but accessed only in order to achieve the necessary result. Long ago, the New York Times Magazine ran a profile of Mike Nichols and I’ve never forgotten the cover photograph of him. He was snazzily dressed, holding a cigar and smiling. But his eyes told a different story. They clearly showed a man determined to have everything — including that particular photo session — go his way.

Maureen Lambray, in the forward to her wonderful portrait collection “The American Film Directors,” also noted that they “smoke a lot and their eyes are attracted to accidents.” I’m not sure what she means by the last comment but I like its dark implications. As for smoking, yes they did. But they’re all dead now. And I quit years ago.

Being humans who perform a superhuman — or perhaps subhuman — job, directors have advice to give. I always find directorial aphorisms amusing and instructive. So why not close out this column with a few of the choicest of these nuggets I’ve collected over the years?

“The first thing to go is the legs.” So said the late Sydney Pollack. He’s correct. By the end of week two, you’re usually sitting down — often lying down–whenever it’s convenient.

“Just tell Raymond not to work too hard.” This from Robert Altman, who told this to Peter Gallagher. Peter, who appeared in my first movie, “Café Society,” told me one day that he would be having dinner that evening with Altman — long a hero of mine. I asked Peter to ask him for any advice for me on my first movie. The above was his response. I later got to know Altman and he told me: “Listen to everyone’s suggestions and use the good ones, because you’ll get all the credit anyway.” 

From my friend Peter Bogdanovich, when asked by Tom Sizemore, who was playing Pete Rose in a Bogdanovich-directed biopic, how to make such an unlikable character acceptable and interesting: “Where’s the redemption?” asked Sizemore. P.B.’s unruffled answer: “In the close-ups.”

Henry Hathaway on compromise: “If you compromise only once a day on something and your shoot lasts 50 days, that’s 50 fucking compromises in the finished picture.” 

On the other hand my old teacher Eddie Dmytryk said: “In films, compromise is a way of life.”

When I was a student at the American Film Institute, the late Dan Petrie — a marvelous fellow and fine director — did a seminar in which somebody asked him what the most important single element in a film was: acting, script or photography? Without pause, Dan answered: “The budget!”

Then there are the words of the great Josef von Sternberg: “”Man has yet to invent a machine more complicated to build, impossible to use or unpredictable in the quality of its finished product, than the motion picture.”

James Cameron suggests: “Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as a director. Now you’re a director. Everything after that, you’re just negotiating your budget and your fee.”

“Masterpieces are films that come to you by accident.” From Sidney Lumet.

And from Alfred Hitchcock: “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.”

Long ago I noticed that a number of films I liked to watch whenever they played on TV all were written and directed by a man who went by the professional name of Billy instead of “William” and whose last name was Wilder. He wrote with one of two partners — the lawyerly sounding Charles Brackett and a name that always sounded to me like it belonged on an antique computer — “I.A.L. Diamond.” Some of the films were funny, others were dark and brooding. But I could tell early on that they came from the same mind and this, more than anything, made me realize that filmmaking could be a personal art. So why not close with a handful of Billy Wilder quotes as my way of thanking him for having played such a large role in getting me involved with this delightful mess of a profession.

On having relationships with actresses: “I never get involved with my actress. If I have a yen, I fuck the stand-in.”

On subtlety in films: “In movies everything must be made obvious.” (The person he’s talking to:) “But Billy, what about subtleties?” “Make the subtleties obvious also.”

On female characters: “Unless she’s a whore, she’s a bore.”

On Marilyn Monroe’s chronic tardiness: “My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?”

“Now what is it which makes a scene interesting? If you see a man coming through a doorway, it means nothing. If you see him coming through a window — that is at once interesting.”

To Louis B. Mayer, after the great mogul saw Wilder’s masterpiece “Sunset Blvd.” and lambasted the director for having the temerity to have made a movie that was critical of Hollywood: “Fuck you.”

And finally the immortal: “A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.”

Naturally, Beck had to respond to this. He did so on his Fox News show Wednesday, in what was actually a pretty amusing segment. Also, as Beck explains it, the anti-Christ thing was a joke. And I have to give this one to Beck: The joke was pretty funny.

Watch the video below. (Hat-tip: The Hollywood Reporter.)

Although I have mixed feelings about “The Hurt Locker” itself, and about the cultural-psychological reasons for its ascendancy, Bigelow herself is a genuine and strange cinematic genius who has paid her dues several times over and richly deserves her moment of triumph. (Is “Hurt Locker” her best film? Probably not. Her second-best? Not even sure about that.) I wish producer-screenwriter Mark Boal hadn’t complicated Bigelow’s big moment on the stage of the Kodak Theatre by persistently tugging on her elbow, like a kid in a department store who needed to use the john. That was odd.

Did it take a grueling, ¿Quién es más macho? war thriller for a female director to win a pile of Oscars? I know there are counter-arguments — mainly, there just haven’t been that many Oscar-scale movies made by women — but I kind of think, yeah, it did. This may have more to do with the Academy’s recent preference for “serious,” male-coded film genres than with simplistic sexual discrimination. Hollywood legend Joseph L. Mankiewicz won back-to-back writing and directing Oscars in 1950 and 1951 for “A Letter to Three Wives” and “All About Eve,” but it’s difficult to imagine such female-centric movies garnering those kinds of honors today.

Taking the longer view, this year’s Oscar campaign and its conclusion offered some crucial flashes of insight into how the Academy works in the 21st century, which is a whole lot different from the way it used to work. Although this goes against nearly everything I believe about life on Planet Earth, I have concluded that Academy voters as a group are less cynical and calculated than I thought — but also that there is a conflict or schism between the membership and the needs and desires of the Academy’s leadership, or at least its image-management and P.R. teams.

I exchanged e-mails late on Sunday night with a critical colleague, one who’d made the same misguided assumptions that I had about the inevitable victory of “Avatar,” notwithstanding the accolades heaped upon “Hurt Locker” by every critics’ group and industry trade organization. Our fundamental error, we concluded, lay in believing that after several years of victories by mid-budget Indiewood pictures the Academy’s collective thinking, and voting behavior, would at some point return to “normal.” What we meant by normal, of course, was an ingrained institutional preference for big-budget spectacle. But that old normal is dead, and here’s the new normal: Hollywood’s central trade group doesn’t like its own movies that much.

Allow me to quote an esteemed expert: “One thing that’s become clear is that the film industry feels no confidence about the cultural significance of its own products. Hollywood’s self-appointed division of self-importance, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, passed up the chance to honor one of the most ambitious and successful films the American movie factories have ever made in order to hand out hardware to a mid-budget, semi-independent production made in Jordan without movie stars.”

OK, the expert is not all that esteemed. It’s me, and other than replacing “India” with “Jordan,” that’s taken verbatim from the article I wrote last year about the Oscar victory of “Slumdog Millionaire” and the shunning of “The Dark Knight.” If anything, the contrast is even starker this time around. “Avatar” is, of course, a much bigger hit than TDK, and its use of motion-capture technology and 3-D clearly points toward the Hollywood future. “The Hurt Locker” is a genuine indie production, financed and made entirely outside the studio system, which grossed less than $15 million in the United States.

Comparing different eras of financial and cinematic history is rife with pitfalls, but that clearly makes “Hurt Locker” the lowest-grossing best-picture winner in Oscar history. (No. 2 is probably “The Last Emperor” from 1987, but when you adjust for inflation, Bernardo Bertolucci’s costume drama made almost three times as much money as Bigelow’s war epic.) It’s delicious and strange and at least potentially ironic that this happened in the year when the Academy expanded the best-picture category from five to 10 nominees, in an evident effort to make the competition more commercial and more attractive to mainstream audiences.

Honestly, the only conclusion I can draw is that Academy members are voting with their hearts. Who’da thunk it? Maybe an earlier generation of Oscar voters was more persuaded by box-office numbers, mass popularity and marketing muscle — or was simply more in tune with mass taste — but they evidently don’t give a damn about those things now. Personally, I’d have ranked a couple of other nominees above “Hurt Locker” — definitely “A Serious Man,” maybe “An Education” — but it’s an idiosyncratic film made by a genuine visionary. Even setting aside the history-making element of this vote (which was surely a consideration) it’s a respectable choice.

Now, the Academy brass, especially its marketing mavens and the shepherds of its lucrative contract with ABC, may take a more jaundiced view of the membership’s sudden attack of integrity and independence. Oscar’s long relationship with the wider moviegoing public has always been tempestuous, but both as a television franchise and a touchstone of cultural relevance, the Academy Awards cannot afford to be seen as some elitist, out-of-touch coastal bastion of indieness. If we allowed ABC execs a free spin in the time machine, and a chance to replace the last four or five years’ worth of Oscar-winners with movies heartland consumers actually paid to watch, they’d take it in a heartbeat.

Still, at least in terms of water-cooler controversy, this year’s Oscars were largely successful. Mind you, the telecast was a misbegotten mishmash, and the toxic, unfunny repartee of Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin made Hugh Jackman’s 2009 song-and-dance numbers look like the height of showbiz professionalism. But viewership was up, reaching the best numbers since the “Crash on Brokeback Mountain” showdown of 2006, and the huge roster of nominated films yielded contradictory but complementary results: Multiple nominations for hugely popular films, and an underdog victory. A lifetime achievement award for Jeff “The Dude” Bridges (let’s be honest; that’s what it was), and shocking proof that Sandra Bullock is not just a human being but a funny, warm and generous-spirited one as well.

But the repercussions of “The Hurt Locker’s” victory over “Avatar” go well beyond Kathryn Bigelow’s historic breakthrough, and well beyond questions of which movie you or I like better, or which one made more money. It’s another salvo in Hollywood’s peculiar, long-running war against itself, a war unlikely to have any winners.