The first Academy Awards banquet, held May 16, 1929, included a special award for Warner Bros. "for producing 'The Jazz Singer,' the pioneering, outstanding talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry."

Does James Cameron's "Avatar" deserve a similar prize? Some industry observers might think so, including Kenneth Turan, a film critic for the Los Angeles Times, who called Cameron's epic "the 'Jazz Singer' of 3-D movies."

"!\p'Avatar' is not the first of the new generation of 3-D films," Turan wrote in his review, "just as 'Jazz Singer' was not the first time people had spoken on screen. But like the Al Jolson vehicle, it's the one that's going to energize audiences about the full potential of this medium."

It's a tempting analogy. But thanks to recent scholarship, notably by Donald Crafton of the University of Notre Dame, we now know that even "The Jazz Singer" was not "The Jazz Singer" of the talkie revolution. The transition from silent films to sound was not something that happened overnight, but a gradual process that began with the talking shorts of the mid-'20s and continued until 1930, when the last silent films were produced in Hollywood.

If 3-D takes hold, it won't be the exclusive doing of "Avatar," but the result of a long series of small technological steps and tiny adjustments in audience expectations. The process is far from over, and its outcome is by no means clear.

The dream of producing 3-D movies goes back to the very beginnings of cinema. Pioneers like Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers aspired from the first to make movies with sound, color and depth, and the basic technology (the separation of a scene into left-eye and right-eye images, brought back together when the spectator looks through filtered glasses) had been around since the magic-lantern days. Experimentation with 3-D films continued through the '20s, and at least one feature-length film — the now lost "Power of Love" (1922) — was produced but not released.

The 3-D boom of the '50s was driven in part by a technological advance — Edwin H. Land's polarized lenses replaced the crude red and green filters of the early processes — and partly by economic demands. Hollywood needed to come up with something to compete with television, which by 1952 was firmly established in American homes.

We're in a similar situation today. The 3-D of the '50s required two 35 mm projectors running in perfect synchronization — tense, sweaty work even for an experienced projectionist. But new technology, notably that developed by the California corporation RealD, makes it possible for a single digital projector to handle both left- and right-eye images, and requires little more than the push of a button to operate. And once again, as Hollywood faces a widening range of competition from cable and satellite television, home video and the Internet, the industry needs a fresh gimmick (and this one has the advantage, at least for the moment, of being pirate-proof).

This latest wave of 3-D filmmaking began with the spectacular Imax 3-D films of the 1990s. Films like "Across the Sea of Time" (1995) and "Wings of Courage" (1995) used a complex and expensive technology, based on liquid crystal "shutter" lenses, to produce strikingly sharp and bright stereoscopic images. (Imax now seems to have phased out its shutter system installations.)

James Cameron used the Imax system to project his 2003 "Ghosts of the Abyss," a 59-minute documentary on the undersea exploration of the Titanic wreck. Its influence can be profoundly felt in "Avatar," with its tentacled sea creatures — spiritually aware jellyfish — floating through the thickened atmosphere of the distant moon Pandora. In 2004, Robert Zemeckis used the Imax system to project the 3-D version of his digitally animated performance-capture film "The Polar Express." At 90 minutes, it was the first feature-length film to do so.

Following Zemeckis' lead, the overwhelming majority of the new 3-D features are animated films of one stripe or another, from the art-house austerity of Henry Selick's lovely "Coraline" to the bright excess of DreamWorks' "Monsters vs. Aliens." Animation helps to hide the lingering artificiality of 3-D while cloaking the new films in an aura of family friendliness — an effective way of warding off the unwholesome associations that 3-D acquired in its last major go-round in the 1970s, with titles like "The Playmates" and "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein."

Apart from exploitation-era throwbacks like "My Bloody Valentine 3D" and "The Final Destination," filmmakers have been holding back from using the process for live-action movies, perhaps because it remains so distracting. It's difficult to get involved in the nuances of storytelling and character construction when objects are leaping from the screen into your lap.

As an animated film with a few human figures composted in, "Avatar" is well positioned to bridge the gap. The ooh-and-ahh effects remain front and center but become part of the story line, reflecting the experience of the hero, Jake, a disabled soldier played by Sam Worthington, as he explores the wonders of Pandora in his new Na'vi body.

As Jake learns to make his way around as a 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned alien (created with the performance-capture techniques pioneered by Zemeckis), the film provides a model for the audience's experience. We enter the film identifying with the human figures; by the end we have shifted our allegiance to the animated characters and have accepted the stereoscopic effects as part of their world, rather than intrusions on ours.

A similar process of normalization — the acceptance of 3-D as just another component of the filmgoing experience, rather than a novelty effect applied to it — will have to occur before stereoscopy takes its place alongside color, sound and wide-screen processes in the filmmaker's toolbox. The rich spectacle of "Avatar" does not represent the endpoint in a technological transition, but rather its launching pad.

The next three or four years will tell the real story, as filmmakers try to expand the use of 3-D beyond the standard 3-D genres (horror, adventure, pornography) and into more naturalistic terrain. It won't be easy. Hollywood's failure to do exactly that is what put an end to the 3-D boom of the 1950s, which petered out just as more normative 3-D films, like Curtis Bernhardt's "Miss Sadie Thompson" and Alfred Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder," entered the marketplace.

It is a time for baby steps, as Hollywood learned during the transition to sound. Audiences must be acculturated, film by film, until they're ready to accept not just cartoons and horror movies in 3-D, but also mainstream comedies, historical dramas and earnest independent films, too.

The 3-D film that will truly merit a special Oscar is not the one with the most mind-blowing effects, but the first to do without them.