And Then There Were Ten – in which our intrepid hero goes back and expands the Academy Award Best Picture nominations to ten nominations, and goes about filling those hypothetical slots. This time – it’s 2008. Check out the previous entries here.
Chapter 3: The Pixar Touch of Gold (WALL*E)
Since the days of Steamboat Willie to the CGI movies of today, very few films have received top recognition in a Best Picture nomination. But the medium has also changed considerably during this time period. It’s hard to imagine the complicated and super-sad Anomalisa up against the bright songs of The Land Before Time, also super-sad in its own right. There are the children’s singalongs, hand-drawn for Disney from yesteryear, and there are the emotionally-wrought, complex and funny character studies that Pixar makes today for Disney.
There are not a lot of statistics to go through, since there have only been three animated features nominated for Best Picture since the very first full-length animated movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. I won’t do the math – the odds aren’t good. The first movie nominated was 1991’s The Beauty and the Beast – the alchemy of technical wizardry, money-fisted campaigning, and animal sacrifice lead this one to make it into BP, with the only guild support coming in sound & music categories. I still do not understand how it made it, so we’ll just move on from that one. The other two are the two years right after expansion with Up (2009) and Toy Story 3 (2010), both from the magical wonderland of Pixar.
Since the original Toy Story in 1995, Pixar has been synonymous with moving animation forward with technology and nuanced storytelling. Responsible for 17 movies and counting (with two more in 2017), why did only Up and Toy Story 3 make it? It’s a combination of guild support and critical acclaim.
If we break down all Pixar movies and their nomination success, they have 42 nominations over this span. Unlike other types of movies, like action or comedy, there are categories which animated features are either unlikely or not applicable to fit. Acting, for one; although there is belief that voiceover and motion-capture work is well-underappreciated here, there hasn’t been one instance of recognizing acting in animation. Likewise for direction, editing, cinematography, production design, visual effects (strangely enough), makeup, and others. We have only two visual effects nominations for The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and this year’s Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) – both are stop motion works.
The closest for broad support is Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) which managed editing, cinematography, production and visual effects in addition to sound – but, it was a mix of live-action and animation. The only categories animated pictures have drawn guild support are in Writing and Sound. Writing is a one-time nomination (you can’t get both Original and Adapted Screenplay for the same movie). But we can break Sound into many categories, some of which are little understood – the at-bats for animated movies in sound categories are Best Score, Song, Sound Mixing and Sound Editing. So, the maximum nominations an animated could expect (barring multiple original song entries) is five, hoping that the sixth is Best Picture. Oh, and Best Animated Movie.
In 2001, the category of Best Animated Feature was created to distinguish achievement in the field. But it also segregated animated movies from other movies – this kind of separation has the effect of recognizing the best cartoon while not having to elevate it in the grander overall movie scheme. The same phenomena happens with documentaries – there are documentaries that are better reviewed and received than some features, and those that even creep into other guild-supporting categories like music (An Inconvenient Truth) or editing (Hoop Dreams), but none that have crept into Best Picture. Since a specific category already exists to distinguish the best of the year – anything else is double-dipping. Similar for Best Foreign film – although there have been some outliers that made it [in the last forty years, only The Postman (1995), Life is Beautiful (1997), Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000), and Amour (2012) have also been Best Picture nominees]. Creating a space to recognize a certain type of movie often relegates it to only that same space.
Now, take WALL*E from this year. This movie won the Best Animated Feature (the minimum requirement for the leap to Best Picture) and also got nominations in Writing (Original) and hit all four sound categories (Score, Song, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing). This movie maxed out its animated feature potential with six total nominations. The two movies that made the cut from Animation netted five nominations apiece, and that’s including the BP nom. Up had Best Picture, Animated Feature, Original Screenplay, Score and Sound Editing while Toy Story 3 had the same, swapping out Score for Song, and Sound Editing for Sound Mixing (but who even knows the difference). If WALL*E snuck in with our magic extra slot for Best Picture, then it would have had seven total nominations, which is legit Academy territory for a contender.
Now for critical acclaim. Like the Golden Globes, critics’ picks are completely unrelated to Oscar success – just ask Brokeback Mountain or The Social Network. Critics are the most vocal group when it comes to prognostication and cheer-leading, but are unconnected to the actual voting process. The relevance in this context is bulletproofing a potential choice – if a fringe movie is riding a tidal wave of kudos, it helps to coat the movie in undeniability, a thick veneer of YES. “Rotten Tomatoes” and “Metacritic” scores are name checked in more Oscar websites and podcasts than Audible ads. The other animated precedents’ Rotten Tomatoes scores were 93% for Beauty, 98% for Up and a respectable 99% for TS3. In comparison, WALL*E had 96%. Lining this up against other 2008 nominees, the five that made it average at about an 82% (The Reader with 61% is not helping things), making this animated movie also the highest rated movie in this bunch.
The nomination support and the critical waves are only part of this pick – the movie is also downright magic. The first half of the movie, where we are introduced to the daily life and charming courtship in a wasted, lonely world, has all the humor and heart of Charlie Chaplin with the swelling music and stunning visuals of a blockbuster. The movie may be a little disjointed with the satire and action-focus in the second half, but there was nothing like the experience of the movie’s beginning anywhere in theatres in 2008. In my opinion, this is still the best that Pixar has offered us. There have been funnier, sadder, more relatable Pixar movies – but this is still the one that filled me with the most awe and wonder when I saw it, well past my childhood.
Peter Howell of the Toronto Star said of this movie – “The greatest of all films by Pixar Animation, the little Disney studio with the Midas touch.” I agree (maybe not the little part), and reward Pixar with my Midas touch of an imaginary nomination.
WALL*E takes my third slot.
Two left.
ONGOING LIST
- Slumdog Millionaire
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
- Frost/Nixon
- Milk
- The Reader
- The Dark Knight
- Doubt
- WALL*E
Next in And Then There Were Ten for 2008, we look at another candidate from the most unlikely source:
The Quote-Unquote Comedy.
Statistics and Oscar history courtesy of: Boxofficemojo.com; Rottentomatoes.com; Metacritic.com; Imdb.com; Wikipedia.org
