New Oscar BP rule advantegeous to animation?

K

Kunmui

New member
It's just been announnced that the 2010 Oscars will now have ten Best Picture nominations as opposed to the usual five. So, I'm wondering...with more slots to fill, will this allow animated features more of a chance at the top prize, or will they continue to be ghettoized in their own "Best Animated Feature" category? :shrug: Up and Coraline are already two of the best-reviewed movies of 2009, and Miyazaki's Ponyo will likely get a lot of critical love, but will they get a chance at Best Picture, period?
 
In what category? With the best animation feature category around I honestly don't see any animated feature ever getting the time of day in the best picture category. I just don't.
 
Wall-E almost made it. Lots of older Academy members admitted to voting for it for Best Picture. I'd guess it was probably the 7th or 8th most voted-for film for a Best Picture nominee. With 10 nominees, I think Up might actually have a chance.
 
To see if Up gets a Best Picture nomination, we'll have to see the live-action competition. I hope Up gets nominated, but it'll probably have to stick with winning Best Animated Feature.
 
They are looking for a bigger audience with this so while I hope this will be good for animation (and learning to appreciate non pixar animation as much as I love pixar) I'm guessing this will be mostly for giving big box office hits a chance. Like giving the Dark Knights a chance among all of the Slumdog Millionare.
 
A signature criticism of the Oscars is that they vote on the movies nobody sees. They'll reward the art film maybe 50 people outside the industry saw over the big box office hit that hundreds of millions of people saw.

This is just to pretend to level the playing the field, but it really doesn't. The Slumdogs and Shakespeare In Loves will win over the Saving Private Ryans and Dark Knights anyway, this is just a desperate attempt to make the industry liked by Americans again.

This could conceivably put Ponyo and Up on the ballot but they will probably not gain much traction.
 
Now, here's the rub that no one wants to hear.

If Up does get nominated, folks will wonder if it's because of the ten-movie limit and if it wasn't in place, would it be nominated. If the film doesn't get nominated, then people will complain, once again claiming the Academy has a bias towards artsy, non-mainstream films, and perhaps rightfully so.

Up will get a Best Picture nomination, guaranteed. But Coraline, which is more or less an artsy independent animated film, likely wouldn't. And then a whole new debate happens, this time within the animation community. Did they pick Up because it's a good movie or because of the Pixar pedigree? But that argument will happen in February when the nominees are announced, especially if Coraline or even another independent animated film, 9, doesn't get a best picture nomination.
 
I guess the short answer is: yes, with 10 slots, it is more likely that an animated movie will get nominated.

The real question is how much more likely.
 
You're right about that. That's what I'm worried about more than anything. Pixar is amazing and wonderful and I'm sure Up was too (I haven't had a chance to see it yet) but the American animation industry exists outside of Pixar(and outside of Dreamworks too) and the Animation industry in general certainly does. Another thing that might happen is that people might be critical of the fact that good anime films like Ponyo, Paprika, Sky Crawlers etc aren't being nominated (because I'm doubting they will at this point). That extends to any good French, Canadian, Brazillian and whatever else animated movies released here

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think the industry will be very kind to non Pixar animated features. I don't even know if they'll be so kind to traditional 2D animation at all. Let's say The Princess and The Frog is one of Disney's most amazing classics ever well it's still traditional 2D and it's going to be associated directly with children, little girls specifially. People may call it a lovely fairy tale but I don't know if it's going to get the whole "transcends generation" treatment because the general mainstream and critics have gotten so use to Pixar and Dreamworks and the like that I fear traditional hand drawn animation is now seen as inferior or not as capable of telling a good story.
 
The "2D for little girls" stigma didn't prevent Beauty & The Beast from getting a BP nom in 1992. Then again, CGI animated features didn't exist then, but that's a different story.
 
Most people would agree that Up is better than Coraline. Coraline won't get nominated because, while a good movie, it isn't Best Picture good. Getting upset over Coraline is like getting upset if the new Harry Potter movie isn't nominated.
 
That's what always happens in the Oscars anyway. Nominations / awards don't go to the films that deserve them, they go to the films whose filmmakers got snubbed the worst in LAST year's Oscars. And of course, the whole reason those filmmakers got snubbed so bad was because THOSE awards were packed full of the guys who got snubbed the year before THAT. And so on.

Up will get nominated, not because it necessarily deserves it on its own merits (it might and it might not: it depends what else comes out in the rest of 09), but because WallE should've gotten a BP nom and didn't.
 
While almost everyone agrees that Coraline is a stunning technical achievement, I think opinion is pretty divided about how good the movie actually is. Up is almost universally praised. It's the safer choice, but it's also much more in line with the general consensus.
 
Back
Top