In Contention

By Josh Spiegel

February 15, 2010

Ocean's Furry 11

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2009 has been a banner year for film; even if all of the movies weren't as consistently awesome as, say, The Hurt Locker, or as mindblowing as Avatar, it's hard to look at the ten Best Picture Oscar nominees and not see some impressive films (and also The Blind Side). But one of the more impressive categories not getting as much attention is the Best Animated Feature category. For only the second time in the category's history (granted, it's only been around for the past decade), there are five nominees: Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Princess and the Frog, The Secret of Kells, and Up. What's more, movies like Ponyo, Mary and Max, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and $9.99 were all considered contenders and missed out. Though there weren't nearly as many Best Animated Feature contenders (fewer than 20 movies were submitted for consideration), the field is wide.

Anyone who's been reading this column, or the A-List, since I've been at Box Office Prophets knows that I am extremely biased for animation. Still, as much as I love the various forms of animation (and kudos to the Academy for acknowledging more than computer animation this year), I've never been a huge fan of the Best Animated Feature category. Though the Academy has given some focus to the art of animation since the 2002 ceremony, I'm no fan of the discrimination that's inherent in creating the category. The argument, since the category was introduced, goes something like this: why should a movie such as Up (or WALL-E or Ratatouille or anything Miyazaki ever created) be nominated for Best Picture, if there's a category for animation? Why potentially honor the movie twice?




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Would we say the same thing of foreign films? In the past few years, there have been a number of truly amazing foreign films that should have been considered for the Best Picture Oscar and the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar. If movies like Pan's Labyrinth, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, Let The Right One In, and The Lives of Others can be considered for the Best Foreign-Language Film category, can they not also get recognition for the Best Picture Oscar? Of course, there are no rules saying that an animated film can't be nominated for Best Picture (obviously), but that doesn't mean that many voters wonder whether such movies should be nominated. What's more, there's a common view of those voters who are actors discriminating against animation to the point of ignoring it. Why honor movies that don't feature actors, they think.

Now, I could argue all day about how movies like Beauty and the Beast or Up (the only two fully animated movies to be nominated for the Best Picture award) are boosted plenty by their performers. For example, everyone rightly acknowledges (and here I include this site's Calvin Awards) that the most memorable scene in Up comes at the beginning, as we watch a montage of the married life of Carl Fredricksen and his wife, Ellie. This scene is noteworthy not just for its poignancy, but because there is no dialogue in the scene. But does that mean that the vocal performance delivered by Ed Asner is not rife with emotion? Should we ignore the film's co-writer, Bob Peterson, who provided the voice of Dug the dog? Would the movie work without those actors, or Jordan Nagai, who voiced Russell?


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