November 28, 2007
Nose on the Prize, but Which Oscar to Sniff?

By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 27 — Eddie Valiant, the hard-nosed private eye played by Bob Hoskins in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” wasn’t about to fiddle with animation. “Forget it,” he said. “I don’t work Toontown.”

Now the makers of “Ratatouille” are about to find out if Valiant also speaks for the movie academy in Hollywood.

As the awards season heats up, the Walt Disney Company and its Pixar Animation Studios unit have been wrestling with a conundrum posed by their warmly received, computer-animated fable about a rat who aspires to become a Parisian chef: Any move to promote it as the year’s best picture might lead to ballot-splitting that would diminish its chances of getting the less prestigious but more easily won Oscar for best animated film.

More than a technical issue, the dilemma goes to the heart of Hollywood’s evolving attitude toward animated movies. Only one, “Beauty and the Beast,” also from Disney, has ever been nominated for best picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (It lost in 1992 to “The Silence of the Lambs.”) In 2002 “Shrek” became the first winner of an Oscar for best animated feature.

But an unintended consequence of the new category was to confine animated movies to a kind of Academy Awards ghetto precisely as they were flourishing at the box office and challenging the best live-action films with their storytelling art.

“I don’t think anybody ever thought about it,” June Foray, a longtime voice actress (“Rocky and His Friends,” “Mulan”) and former member of the academy’s board of governors, said of the resulting predicament. “We were just proud of getting an Oscar for animated features.” (Richard Cook, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, spotted the danger early on. “We all hope this doesn’t take away the opportunity of an animated feature to be recognized as best picture,” he told Variety in December 2000.)

Under the academy’s rules, films nominated for best animated feature are automatically considered eligible for best picture. Similarly, their actors — though delivering only voice performances — are eligible for general acting nominations, though none have ever received one, and their writers and directors are similarly eligible for general awards.

But studios like Disney and DreamWorks Animation, which made “Shrek,” have come to fear that a push for best-picture votes, however well deserved, will pull some fans among the academy’s 6,000 voting members toward that category, while others cast a vote for animation.

Members could vote for the film in both categories. But Oscar campaigners assume that many would choose just one — a dangerous situation, given the small voting pool and the razor-thin margins that can determine a winner. Such a split could leave even a film as widely admired as “Ratatouille” — A. O. Scott, co-chief film critic for The New York Times, called it “a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film” — without a prize. Meanwhile a strong competitor like, say, “Persepolis,” about growing up in Iran, might slip into the animated winner’s circle.

The studios’ reluctance to advance their animated wares as candidates for best picture is enforced by a perception that actors, the academy’s largest branch, with about 20 percent of the membership, are reluctant to honor movies without live performances. Additionally, the academy has a definite allergy to family fare, like the G-rated “Ratatouille”: 28 R-rated films have been nominated for best picture in the last 10 years, while only two PG-rated movies — “Finding Neverland” and “Good Night, and Good Luck” — have. And none with a G rating have made the cut.

Disney executives declined to discuss their award-season strategy for “Ratatouille.” But early indications show the studio walking an awkward line between reaching for the big prize and pointing voters toward the smaller one.

A two-page advertisement in Monday’s Daily Variety, for instance, described “Ratatouille” as “the best-reviewed film of the year ... around the world.” But it modestly offered the picture “pour votre considération” only as best animated feature, while also mentioning the screenwriter and director Brad Bird.

Although the awards are not announced until Feb. 24, Mr. Bird has already shown up on the screening-and-appearance circuit that helps drive the movie world’s prize campaigns. And Disney’s reticence notwithstanding, a bit of a groundswell is likely to buoy his film’s best-picture prospects as critics’ “10 Best” lists start appearing in December, and the various pre-Oscar prizes, including the Golden Globes (where “Ratatouille” is eligible for only an animated award), fall into place.

Don Hahn, who produced “Beauty and the Beast” for Disney, meanwhile acknowledged that his own film might not have entered the record books with a best-picture nomination if the animated category had existed at the time.

“I hate to think that,” said Mr. Hahn, an executive vice president for Disney’s animation unit. “But as a voter, you tend to categorize animation as a genre as opposed to a technique.”

An admirer of “Ratatouille,” Mr. Hahn said he would be pleased to see that picture and its producer, Brad Lewis, end his own status as the only producer whose film was nominated for more than Toontown honors. “I absolutely want some company,” he said.

Under the academy’s rules, films nominated for best animated feature are automatically considered eligible for best picture. Similarly, their actors — though delivering only voice performances — are eligible for general acting nominations, though none have ever received one, and their writers and directors are similarly eligible for general awards.

This is pretty nice info.

I don't think it deserves one, but it would certainly shake things up, and a nice change from all the darkness permeating the nominees this year.

Yeah... because it's not like it's not one of the greatest animated films... or films... of all time...

We'll have to agree to disagree then.