I’ve been thinking about this since A Curious Case of Benjamin Button went through the awards cycles last year. Where’s the line between Visual effects movie and animated feature.
Last night in one of his acceptance speeches, Cameron said that every blade of grass had to be created. How is that different from Up or Kung Fu Panda? If that’s the case then the design categories, especially Production Design and visual effects need to be opened to films like Up.
Last year Benjamin Button won for best makeup, but Brad Pitt was mostly CGI’ed. Watch this TED Talk about their process here. Now tell me it fair for them to compete in that category against a film like Hell Boy II that used way more practical effect and makeup…
Go a step further and think about what we are giving these awards for — it is for mastery of a physical technique or is it for using techniques in a masterful way to tell a story. If it’s for physical techniques, then we need to come down hard and segregate out films like Button and Avatar into a reality like they used to do — awards for Color and Black And White films. If it’s for using techniques to service a story, then I think we need to lift the written and unwritten bans on Films like Up for even being considered for non Animation awards.
And it’s important to address these issues sooner rather than later. Watching a movie like Up In The Air after watching Avatar, both good for what they are, but realities and orders of magnitude apart in terms of scale and budget. And last year some of the best Cinematography ever was in Kung Fu Panda, but that’d would never even come close to being considered for the Oscar for Best Cinematography.
If you’re thinking CGI Cinematography and Real Cinematography are different, then you haven’t spent any time on a set of a real big budget movie, where they have complete control of their environment, especially in the studio.
Anyway, food for thought. Where is the line? Should there be two set of awards? Should they invite Pixar to compete in all of the categories? Chime in in the comments!
2 Comments
January 18, 2010 at 10:50 am
These days there should be no animation categories – just treat all animation the same as other films (since often these days they are).
Trouble is, if they removed animations then almost no comedies would ever win anything . . ..
January 18, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Although it’s hard to draw lines and create categories without extremely fine details on what would fit in one and what would fit in another category… I do think some sort of separation is necessary.
I think though that to start… it would be good to perhaps redefine what the current awards mean so that movies like UP could qualify for certain awards… just like making sure that other films don’t qualify for the wrong awards (I loved Benjamin Button but don’t feel right about it winning the makeup award).
I’m not volunteering any sort of great solution… I’m just agreeing that the current system doesn’t work for me and what I see in all these different styles of films.