Nose on the Prize, but Which Oscar to Sniff?
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
Published: November 28, 2007
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 27 — Eddie Valiant, the hard-nosed private eye played by Bob Hoskins in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” wasn’t about to fiddle with animation. “Forget it,” he said. “I don’t work Toontown.”
Now the makers of “Ratatouille” are about to find out if Valiant also speaks for the movie academy in Hollywood.
As the awards season heats up, the Walt Disney Company and its Pixar Animation Studios unit have been wrestling with a conundrum posed by their warmly received, computer-animated fable about a rat who aspires to become a Parisian chef: Any move to promote it as the year’s best picture might lead to ballot-splitting that would diminish its chances of getting the less prestigious but more easily won Oscar for best animated film.
More than a technical issue, the dilemma goes to the heart of Hollywood’s evolving attitude toward animated movies. Only one, “Beauty and the Beast,” also from Disney, has ever been nominated for best picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (It lost in 1992 to “The Silence of the Lambs.”) In 2002 “Shrek” became the first winner of an Oscar for best animated feature.
But an unintended consequence of the new category was to confine animated movies to a kind of Academy Awards ghetto precisely as they were flourishing at the box office and challenging the best live-action films with their storytelling art.
more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/movies/awardsseason/28rata.html?_r=1&ref=awardsseason&oref=slogin
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
The issue about Ratatouille stems from another problem in choosing the category in which a movie can compete. By setting the agenda, the award givers can influence and even predetermine the fate of a movie being awarded a prize. If an animation movie competes in the category of "Best picture" it has very low chances to win. If it competes in a separate category it will be evaluated on different criteria. The question then is why an animated movie cannot compete in both categories. Potential ballot-splitting is one of the reasons and the risks of strategic voting another.
Post a Comment