Top Five Pet Peeves of the 2014-15 Oscar Season

The Oscar season is always draining – emotionally and physically, given the length of the broadcast – but there's still one last drop of blogging to be drained from my fingertips before officially calling it a year: My annual rundown of personal highs and lows from the season that was. I find it the perfect way to purge any lingering feelings before psyching myself up for the coming cinematic calendar, which is sure to have its own slate of travesties and triumphs.

I'll be posting my top ten in the form of two top fives. We'll get the ball rolling with the five things that bugged me most during the 2014-15 film awards circuit:

Oscar Postmortem Pt. 1: The Results

Happy New Year, everybody!

With the Oscars having come and gone (after three long hours at the end of three long months), it feels like 2014 is now officially over, and a new cinematic cycle has thankfully begun. But, since I, like most Oscar obsessives (or any kind of obsessive), have trouble letting go, it'll be about a week before I finally cease writing about 2014 in this space. Heed the lessons learned by Cheryl Strayed
(for whom they picked an awful Best Actress clip, btw); Closure takes time.
And so I must always allow myself several days to fully process the mad rush of euphoria and anguish that floods me before, during, and after this annual event.

My post-dated “live” blog of the Oscar telecast itself will arrive later this week, followed by my usual top ten of personal highs and lows of the 2014-15 awards season. But for today, its all about who won and who lost, and my immediate reactions to those, which I should document for posterity before my mind instinctively turns to 2015-16.

For starters, my own prediction results:

'Birdman' and 'Sniper' Both Win MPSE Awards

The Motion Picture Sound Editors spread the wealth at last night's Golden Reel Awards, bestowing trophies upon the Oscar-nominated sound editing teams of Birdman, American Sniper, Unbroken, among others not cited by the Academy's sound branch; Big Hero 6, Get On Up, The Liberator, and Warsaw Uprising.

American Sniper's victory came on its sole nomination, Best Sound Effects and Foley, commonly seen as the closest descriptor of the Oscar for sound editing.

I'm starting to smell a bit of a Hugo-v.-War-Horse situation brewing in the sound categories...

'Birdman' Complicates Sound Mixing Race with CAS Win

In a busy guild evening that also included the WGA and the MHG, The Cinema Audio Society announced their picks for the best mixed soundtracks of the year last night. While the former two guilds decided on winners that basically align with the current pundit logic of who will win the respective Oscar categories for writing and makeup (The Imitation Game, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and possibly Guardians of the Galaxy), the CAS has thrown the Best Sound Mixing contest for a bit of a loop.

Birdman, with its artfully arranged sonic subtleties and crazy guild momentum, bested its louder competitors (and fellow Oscar nominees) American Sniper and Interstellar. Alejandro G. Inarritu's backstage dramedy is clearly the industry favourite overall, primed to claim the Best Picture Oscar in a week's time, but it would just make such an atypical winner in this field. Even Hugo had more conspicuous sound work.

VES Makes Right Call on Apes, Over-praises Big Hero 6

The Visual Effects Society declared its superlatives for the 2014 year in film last night, and the big victor was Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, taking home three trophies including the top prize of Best Visual Effects in an Effects-Driven Film. Can't argue with that assessment, although the Academy might. Rise of the Planet of the Apes was similarly successful with the guild on 2012, only to be pipped by the prestige veneer of Hugo. Interstellar -- which won a single VES Award for its awesome Tesseract -- seems like it's in a position to pull off a similar coup.

"Apes at VES... strong. Apes at Academy... weak."

Other feature film winners include Birdman for supporting fx (easy call), and X-Men: Days of Future Past picking up two awards for the dazzling work in that kitchen sequence.

On the animated side of things, the group continued their maddening pattern of handing all four applicable categories to the same film, the beneficiary being
Big Hero 6. Look, it had really cool simulation effects animation and certainly deserved to win something (namely, that character animation category which it should have won at the ANNIES), but the work in How to Train Your Dragon 2 and The Boxtrolls is equally impressive. Seriously, when was the last time the VES spread the wealth in these categories? I'm struggling to think of a year when there wasn't a sweeper.

Check out all the winners after the cut.

'Dragons 2' Secures its Oscar-by-Default Position

DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon 2 took home six Annie Awards, including Best Animated Feature and Best Directing for writer-director Dean DeBlois. With the Golden Globe also in hand and the former frontrunner out of the way, it's looking more and more like the beloved franchise will get to bask in Oscar glory.

Speaking of that former frontrunner, Academy snubees Phil Lord and Chris Miller did get a consolation prize for Best Writing, as appropriate a place as any to honour The LEGO Movie's meta comedy stylings.

Among Dragons' remaining Oscar competition, The Boxtrolls won two richly deserved trophies (for its immaculate production design and Ben Kinsgley's inimitable performance), while Big Hero 6 took home only one (albeit a hard-earned one for it cool animated effects).

But Disney can take solace in that fact that their Best Animated Short Oscar contender Feast won its correlative category here. The crowd-pleasing toon is indeed a formidable threat for the Academy Award.

Sadly, GKIDS offerings Song of the Sea and Princess Kaguya were too modest to impress the organization. See all the winners after the cut.

One Category at a Time: Animated Feature

Guys, we need to talk about Best Animated Feature. Most years, this is one category that hardly requires discussion at all. If it isn't a slam dunk victory for one obvious frontrunner (which it almost always is), then it can at least be boiled down to a two-horse race with the also-rans far in the distance. This year was shaping up to be another easy call you could use to inflate your prediction accuracy, until the biggest shocker of nomination morning. Everyone enjoys griping about presumed snubs that ultimately don't affect the outcome of the awards race, but this is one snub that has truly blown the category wide open.

The cast of The LEGO Movie is stunned by its Oscar snub!

Review - Big Hero 6

With Marvel Comics now securely locked beneath the turrets of Sleeping Beauty's castle, Walt Disney Animation is finally trying their hand at the superhero genre with Big Hero 6; A sanitized adaptation (directed by Chris Williams and Don Hall) of a comic book series so obscure, you'd never guess it was a Marvel property were it not for the obligatory Stan Lee cameo.

Set in the vaguely futuristic city of San Fransokyo – essentially San Francisco with some Asian facades – Big Hero 6 starts as a story of two orphaned brothers... because it wouldn't be Disney without some tragic backstory. The youngest, Hiro (Ryan Potter), squanders his prodigious robotics aptitude on seedy underground bot fights, much to the chagrin of the eldest, Tadashi (Daniel Henney), who applies his equally impressive knack for engineering at a cutting-edge technical institute.