The first Oscar Night since I started the Ink and Pixel Club has come and gone. Though enjoy watching the festivities (for as long as I can stay awake), I try not to take the Academy Awards too seriously. I realize that an Oscar can be a great boost to an individual or film. But these awards are not chosen by the almighty drama gods or FilmCriticBot 3000. They’re picked by people. Smart, talented, qualified people, yes, but people nonetheless. Academy voters don’t get sequestered away from the world for a year so that they can judge films solely on their inherent merits. They have their own tastes, prejudices, and biases. So while winning the Oscar may be a great honor, it isn’t factual confirmation that one person’s film, performance, or behind-the-scenes work is better than anyone else’s in the past year. I try to keep the role film industry politics plays in mind as the prized statuettes go off to their new homes.

That doesn’t mean I don’t get disappointed when I think the Academy has made a bad call.

Up winning Best Animated Feature Film was not a disappointment. Admittedly, I’m a big fan of the older styles of animation, so part of me was a little sad to see the Oscar go to the one computer animated film nominated. But even that part of me recognizes that Up is a very good movie that does push some boundaries for animation. Pixar always delivers films that are top notch visually, but the story of Up is equally groundbreaking, if not more so. I’ve watched Pixar gently nudge mainstream audiences towards the idea that animated films don’t have to be all about kids or kid-relatable characters and their problems. Up represents a big step in that direction. This is a film that stars an elderly man and starts off by taking us through the decades he spent with his beloved wife up until her death. At least one analyst predicted that the firm would not be commercially viable. How many studios would have caved in to panicked marketing execs and dumped the whole opening, or made Russell the main character and altered him to make him more “aspirational” for a young audience? In his acceptance speech, director Pete Docter thanked Disney and Pixar for backing such an “oddball” film, something that not every studio would do.

The outcome of this particular race was considered a foregone conclusion by many critics and fans. As I mentioned in my earlier article about the Oscar nominees, Up was the only film in contention for Best Animated Feature to also be nominated one of the best films of the year overall. Going purely on logic, that would indicate that the Academy sees Up as the best animated film of the year. But Pixar’s film was up against some stiff competition. The past year was a very good one for animated features, as evidenced by the fact that there were five worthy nominees this year instead of the usual three. Up is a worthy winner and Pixar should feel even happier about bringing home the award because of the high quality of the film’s competitors for that honor.

The Best Animated Short Film category generally gets ignored by everyone but animation fans. Critics usually skip it when making their predictions for the winners. The general public has seldom seen more than one of the nominated films. This was not always true. Back in the days when moviegoers could expect to see one or more short films before the feature presentation, shorts were widely seen and some became incredibly popular and well-known. But the cost of producing shorts, the arrival of television, and other factors led studios to abandon the format. In recent years, some of the major animation studios have started producing shorts again, recognizing their potential for experimentation and telling different kinds of stories. These studio shorts are usually run before a new animated film and often included on the DVD release, meaning that a large number of people sees them. But studio animated shorts are still far less common than they were in the heyday of the short film format. Most creators of animated short films – particularly the ones that get nominated for Best Animated Short – are independent animators, toiling in relative obscurity and known only to those fans who seek out the animation festivals where their work plays.

Because of this, I have a soft spot for the independent animators who usually nab the bulk of the Best Animated Short nominations. These are people who don’t get recognized for their work very much outside of the animation community, so it’s good to see them get their fifteen minutes – or thirty seconds. I am sure that Nicolas Schmerkin and the rest of the crew of this year’s winner Logorama worked very hard in the six years it took them to make their film and that the Oscar will help them to gain broader recognition from people who can fund their next project.

That said, I absolutely hated Logorama.

I didn’t feel like there was a real stand-out in this year’s Animated Short nominees. My prediction was that the Academy would hand the Oscar to A Matter of Loaf and Death, based on their past fondness for Aardman’s work. I love Wallace and Gromit and the film is solid, but neither the story nor the animation felt like anything new or groundbreaking for the series. Either French Roast or The Lady and the Reaper would have been a fine choice. Like the Wallace and Gromit film, they aren’t terribly innovative, but both are stylish and fun. Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty has a fun premise, but doesn’t explore it enough and features some weak character design. But Logorama was the one short I never wanted nor expected to win.

Rather than character or story, Logorama is constructed around a concept. This does not automatically doom it. I have seen very interesting and entertaining films that focus primarily on concept and the short film format is an ideal way to explore an idea without risking the audience growing bored or confused by the lack of traditional narrative. The concept in Logorama is a world where virtually everything – people, objects, vehicles, buildings, and landscape – is a logo or commercial spokescharacter. The problem is that this idea on its own isn’t enough to sustain a short film – much less a short film that runs sixteen minutes. Logorama doesn’t give the audience anything beyond this initial concept: no compelling characters to follow, no engaging plot thread, no underlying commentary on our advertising-saturated society or anything else. The film presents recognition of these familiar logos as all that is needed to keep us amused. It reminds me of those shorts that ran before the Pokémon movies where the main purpose was to cram as many of the marketable little critters as possible into the allotted time. The humor feels like it might have been sharp and cutting edge ten or more years ago, but comes off stale and tired today. Normally innocuous figures from pop culture out of character has been done before and the short presents nothing more original than Mr. Clean with an effeminate voice. What plot there is jumps around from one event to another without offering much reason to care about any of them. There is a lot of action that should be upping the excitement level, but with nothing to ground it but a pack of characters as one-dimensional as they are when they’re hawking hamburgers and toilet paper, the film merely drags. The animation is nothing new: computer animation made to look more graphic and hand-drawn. The novelty of spotting logos and seeing how they are integrated into the world wears off quickly, leaving the viewer with nothing but a dull, unwieldy waste of time.

I can see how Aardman’s past Oscar wins might have worked against the studio. But if the Academy had wanted to recognize fresh talent rather than rewarding Aardman for doing the same thing well one more time, why not pick any of the other nominated films, all of which are at least superior to Logorama? I found this film incredibly disappointing and the Academy’s choice to award it the Oscar even more so. If Nicolas Schmerkin follows up on his desire to spend the next thirty-six years working on a feature film, I can only hope that he comes up with a better idea than a gun-toting criminal Ronald McDonald.

I’d like to end on a happy note, in honor of the good the Academy has done in recognizing the art of animation this year and in years past. One of my favorite parts of the whole broadcast (or what I stayed up to see) was the characters from the five Best Animated Feature nominees discussing how they felt about being nominated. It was a real treat to see what may be the last new animation of many of these characters. These fun little moments with the animated stars speak to the power of animation to create believable characters who can be just as convincing and beloved as their live-action colleagues.

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