Terrence Briggs wrote:
>>
>>There is, at the moment, so much momentum over Wall-E initially getting
>>100%% on RT (it's down to the 97's now, thanks to two or three
>>"depressing" party-poopers) that...yep...you guessed it...LA voters are
>>currently asking whether it could also be nominated for Best Picture
>>"for the first time since Beauty&Beast", unquote. -_-
>
> But to answer your original provocation... Why shouldn't Wall-E be
> noninated for Best Picture? Forget the LA strawmen for a bit, and
> address the issue being raised.
>
>>By creating the Oscar category, we thought we had finally found the
>>vaccine to the Disease.
>>But as long as LA will always be LA, you just can't teach a Sneetch.
>>
>>there's GOT to be some way we can finally stop them)
>
> Maybe by GIVING the Best Picture Oscar to an animated film, we'll shut
> 'em up.
And maybe if we finally give the heroin addict just *one* little shot
for the road, he'll stop asking...
Nnnope--Sorry, as much as we want to abstract the issue, those darn LA
Oscar-fanboys keep beating down the door:
By their own admission, the issue for them is not so much whether the
film itself is good (which, the weekend not being over yet, I can't
vouch for), but more, "C'moooon, why can't Pixar get one o' them cool
Picture nominations too, like Disney did?--They're better, y'know!"
IOW, the same campaigning for "Toy Story 2" that created the shut-em-up
category in the first place--And which I could've seen being a better
candidate if anyone WERE to open the same Pandora/genie-bottle for
Disney's ego, which the Academy had quite enough of the first time,
thank you much.
I'd rather see a movie be nominated as a movie, and not a symbol.
(And no, IMO, Scorsese shouldn't have gotten a Best Director for his
movie simply because he "hadn't won one yet".)
I can't think of one that might stand a chance of winning,
> and no one will agree with my suggestions for past animated films that
> might have deserved the award, so I'll chalk it up to animation
> haterade. Simply put, there are some folks who REFUSE to accept that
> an animated film will EVER be more deserving of acclaim than a high-
> minded, competently made piece of live-action Oscar Bait. The E.T-
> Gandhi debate has NOTHING on animatophobia.
Some people don't remember the Return of the King vs. Mystic River
debate--which took ET-vs-Gandhi to even uglier dark regions of
classism--and I'd argue that that one was better resolved for Oscar
posterity.
And I still claim that half of "Finding Nemo"'s hoo-hah in '03 was the
catastrophic summer drought causing the mainstream to finally get their
national thump-on-the-head that, duh, Pixar movies were pretty good
compared to lame studio blockbusters, but let's not go around giving
Nobel Prizes to common sense.
Derek Janssen
ejanss1@
verizon.net
