Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category
The Academy Awards
Up is nominated for Best Picture
This year the Academy Awards got it right. Nearly twenty years after the first and only animated film nomination for Best Picture — Beauty and the Beast, 1991 — the voters have nominated Pixar’s Up.
It’s a good year for breaking ground at the Oscars, as it turns out, with the Academy giving genre pictures more recognition than usual. Science fiction’s credibility increased significantly this year with major nominations for Avatar, District 9, Coraline and other genre pics.
But the real watershed moment is the Up nomination for Best Picture. Pixar’s been producing enchanting, affecting films for years now, and critics have long discussed the studio’s absent and much-deserved Best Picture nominations. Pixar’s 2008 release, Wall-E, was perhaps the biggest disappointment of the Oscar nominations that year — it was relegated to the Best Animated Film category, where it competed against Bolt and Kung Fu Panda. Well, of course Wall-E won. But the win didn’t really matter so much. Pixar’s movies have serious advantages over most contemporary animated films: they’re written and created by artists and writers who love a good story, and know what makes one.
Wall-E (2008) was shut out of the Best Picture category
Wall-E was revolutionary, a film that not only presented audiences with an unattractive future, but a silent one, populated by a lonely robot and the aftermath of humanity. It drew raw hope from real, tangible despair. Its first half-hour was perhaps the best post-humanity film I’ve ever seen. I’d waited years for a post-apocalyptic movie that wasn’t stuffed to the gills with zombies or mutants. I never imagined I’d find what I was looking for in an animated film.
Up was a genuinely moving motion picture, and I’m very happy that it’s the film that’s once again broken the barrier between animated films and ‘serious’ movies. But I like to think that Wall-E, following in the path of so many other overlooked animated treasures (The Iron Giant, anyone?), was the movie that made it possible for people to regard animation on the same plane as live-action.
Here’s hoping this will lead, sooner than later, to the dismantling of the specialty film categories — Best Foreign Film, Best Animated Film — altogether. A great movie is a great movie is a great movie.
