Kill the Cartoon Oscar

In the lead-up to the Oscars, there’s always a lot of discussion around what will win, the overwhelming majority of which centers on the “big five” awards (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress). And whatever you think about the Oscars, there are usually some interesting features battling it out, even if they aren’t quite what you might think are actually the best films. (“Best Picture Made in America, By a Big Studio and Seeming Important Without Being Too Challenging” might be a better name for the night’s biggest award).

But how’s this for a strange little Oscar Contest? Best Animated Feature has three nominees (down from five because less than sixteen films were eligible): Cars, Happy Feet, and Monster House. I have already expressed my dissatisfaction with the okay-to-mediocre Cars and the surprisingly bad Happy Feet. I haven’t seen Monster House, and from most reports it’s actually pretty good. But it is a heavily motion-captured film (as, to a lesser extent, is Happy Feet), which means that however good it might be, its pretty dubious as an example of the best of the animated form.

Which brings up the question: should the Animated Feature award exist at all? It’s a recent invention, having only been started in 2001, just as the big nineties revival of theatrical animation was winding down. Despite the downturn in fortunes of the industry (particularly for hand-drawn animation), the award has been saved from outright embarrassment by Pixar, Japan’s Studio Ghibli, and Aardman. (The winners, for the record, have been Shrek, Spirited Away, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit). This year, though, both Pixar and Aardman have produced mediocre movies (Cars and the un-nominated Flushed Away), meaning that there’s nothing that can win that won’t be something of an embarrassing choice.

Which leads to my conclusion that the award should be scrapped. The pool is too small, for a start: there were less than sixteen eligible films last year, and many in that sixteen would have been virtual non-starters like Curious George or Barnyard. In reality, it becomes a lucky dip for that year’s film from one of about four or five studios: Dreamworks, Aardman, Disney, Pixar, Ghibli, and maybe Blue Sky or a couple of others. This year’s spectacle of a non-deserving film getting the award looms as an all-too-likely recurring problem. It’s been something of a fluke that there have been good films to award each year: a glance through the nominees reveals just how thin the pickings has been. (Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron? Treasure Planet? Shark Tale?) Only a couple of times – with Howl’s Moving Castle in 2005, and The Triplets of Belleville in 2003 – has there been a good film nominated that had to miss out.

The original hope was that the award would lead to more recognition for animators and the animation field generally, and the animated short award has certainly served such a purpose admirably. But with the arguable exception of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, the interesting, edgy films are shut out, and big studio films with plenty of recognition are all that get rewarded. So in practice, all the award is doing is reinforcing the ghetto effect, relegating animation to its own category so it doesn’t have to compete against the “real” movies. (Animated features are eligible for the regular Best Picture award, but you can bet there won’t even be a nomination while the separate category exists).

Sure, if they get rid of the category, there won’t be a lot of Oscars going to animated features. Prior to the category, only one was nominated for Best Picture: Beauty and the Beast, in 1991. But that example is instructive. When that film was nominated, it was a big deal, one of the real signals that Disney features were back and worth seeing. It was a rare breakthrough, but it was infinitely more worthwhile than all the meaningless nominations now animation has its own category.

It’s difficult to imagine any of the US features from the last decade having been nominated for Best Picture if the animation category hadn’t existed. But it’s not so implausible that something like Spirited Away couldn’t have given the Best Foreign Language Film category a real shake if its American distributors had given it a marketing push for that award. How much more would that have meant for the medium than the current annual Best Kids Movie spectacle?