My buddy Jerry Beck has a short piece up lamenting what he calls the "second class status" of animated features in Hollywood, as proven by the fact that they're such longshots for the Best Picture Oscar. Here…read a little of what Jerry has to say…
This is the reality: no matter how much money animation makes, or how many hits Pixar and Dreamworks churn out, animation is still a 2nd class citizen in Hollywood. I don't like it that way. It's not how I think — but it's the way it is. And nothing that happens seems to change that perception. Four of the top 10 movies of 2008 (in U.S. box office gross) were animated features — four — and the other six were blockbusters that had more than their fair share of CGI effects (Iron Man, Dark Knight, etc).
Or you can go here and read all of what he has to say and many comments. Here's mine: I think this is a bit of a misperception of Hollywood status. Actually, there are two kinds of status in this business — financial and critical. Financial status is very simple. The more you gross, the more you get. Money is utterly non-discriminatory in terms of animation versus live-action. So when Jerry brings up the issue of the top 10 movies in terms of box office gross…well, those are indeed the movies that achieved that kind of status. And in Hollywood, no one belittles financial success. Truth be told, most would rather have that than the other kind.
That other kind is the critical kind. It's somewhat irrelevant to what a movie grosses and it oughta be. If you think the box office oughta matter, then there's no point in having anyone vote for the Oscars. Just give the little bald gold man to whichever film made the most dollars. Since we don't do that, clearly the Academy Awards are about something else…and as sensibilities have evolved, that something else is generally (generally, now) about courage in filmmaking. It's about creating a movie that goes somewhere new, takes some risks and leaves audiences feeling they've experienced something more than a fun thing to watch while eating Raisinets in the dark.
Whether that's the best possible use of the Oscar, I dunno…but I think it's pretty much what the voters have in mind. They like movies about which no one at the studio said, "Don't worry…this can't possibly lose money because it has all these things in common with last year's big hits." That's not true of most animated features these days. It's not even true of most successful movies.
The Top 10 movies of 2008, as listed on the chart Jerry linked to, were The Dark Knight, Iron Man, the latest Indiana Jones film, Hancock, Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, Twilight, the new James Bond film and Horton Hears a Who. None of those movies, with the occasional exception of The Dark Knight, are even being mentioned as possibles for Best Picture. It's not because some of them are animated. It's because all of them were very commercial pictures with proven selling points — cute aliens, superheroes, vampires, new characters backed by solid merchandising campaigns, sequels to past blockbuster hits,etc. Milk had none of those safe marketing attributes. Neither did Frost/Nixon. Neither did Slumdog Millionaire or Doubt or Benjamin Button, which is why those will probably be all or most of the five nominees.
I don't think there's a prejudice against animation. Beauty and the Beast was nominated for Best Picture. I have a hunch — we'll never know for sure — that The Incredibles would have been nominated if the Academy hadn't, bowing to demands within the animation community, added that Best Animated Feature category. That's probably made it less likely that a cartoon will be up for Best Picture because voters will figure that they're supposed to vote for great cartoons in that division and not the other. In a sense, by lobbying for that, cartoon buffs spread the notion that animated features weren't to be considered in the same competition as live-action films.
Someday, there'll be an animated feature so overpowering and different that it will bust out of that niche and score as Best Picture. Frankly, I don't see the point of trying to hasten that day…but if we want to, we should start lobbying to get rid of that Best Animated Feature category. That, more than anything else, tells the industry there's a place to honor Wall-E and it isn't as Best Picture.