One Category at a Time: Animated Feature

Never can I remember the race for Best Animated Feature being as competitive as its been this year. Not that I think it's been a particularly stellar year for the medium. To me, the closeness of the race is due to all the nominees achieving roughly the same level of enjoyable mediocrity, with one standout clearly above the rest, but that doesn't mean it has the Oscar locked up.

Life of Pi and Brave clean up at VES Awards

The Visual Effects Society came through for Life of Pi (like we knew they would), handing it four honours including the Best Visual Effects in a Visual Effects-Driven Motion Picture. The Avengers and The Hobbit were consoled with two wins and one win respectively.

In the animated categories, Brave swept the board, winning all four prizes for effects in animated films. It's a beautiful film with great effects and all, but I gotta say:

ParaNorman = robbed.

Just saying.

All the winners after the jump.

Producers Guild preview

Tonight the first major industry guild will announce its winners: The Producers Guild of America. Not only are they the first guild out the gate in this loooong phase 2, but they're arguably the most important, or at least the most indicative, when it comes to winning Best Picture.

When the Academy made the switch to ten nominees and the preferential ballot back in 2009, the PGA was quick to shadow their decision. In all three years since, the PGA and Academy have matched up. So it follows that tonight's winner should be considered in the driver's seat for Best Picture... for the moment.

Visual Effects Society noms

The VES has revealed their nominations for the 2012 year in film, and leading the way with seven nods is The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, followed closely by Life of Pi and The Avengers with six. All are presumed Oscar nominees, but guessing those final two slots gets a bit tricky.

The Dark Knight Rises has been an assumed nominee all year, but only scooped one mention from the guild; for its great miniatures. Another superhero film to reap a sole nomination is The Amazing Spider-Man, which few are anticipating will earn Academy love anyway. I'm beginning to come around to the thought of Prometheus -- which garnered three nods -- taking that fifth slot. Its effects work was pretty terrific, and three of the Alien films earned Oscar nominations for visual effects.

The four other films shortlisted by the Academy were snubbed altogether. Skyfall's shutout here might be attributed to its abundance of practical effects, but could ride a wave of momentum through the craft categories to a surprise effects nomination on Thursday. Cloud Atlas' Oscar chances are all but dead in the water after being largely written off as a confusing flop. Ditto John Carter. Snow White and the Huntsman might be a dark horse to watch.

On the animated side of things, I'm delighted to see ParaNorman do so well with five nominations. For those of you who've been asking about my own awards, I may as well mention right now that its effects are among the most impressive of the year in my opinion.

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects-Driven Feature Motion Picture
"The Avengers"
"Battleship"
"The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey"
"Life of Pi" The current frontrunner, and likely Oscar winner
"Prometheus"

Annie Award nominations

Nominations for the 40th annual Annie Awards have been announced by ASIFA-Hollywood. Leading the pack are the prize hopefuls from the Mouse House: Pixar's Brave and Disney's Wreck-It Ralph each landed ten nominations. ParaNorman and Hotel Transylvania took eight apiece. DreamWorks' Rise of the Guardians nabbed six.

More than ever, the organization feels like one with a severe identity crisis. In order to quell backlash from the realization a few years back of a disproportionally DreamWorks-based voting membership, they have been continually tweaking their voting process to cast a very broad net. It's more of a dishonour not to be nominated! And yet they still manage to miss obvious achievements in several categories. How does Brave not get cited for storyboarding? How does Frankenweenie lose out on character design? How do Wreck-It Ralph leads John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman get passed over for Alan Tudyk's broad impersonation of Ed Wynn in Voice Acting?

All in all, take it with a grain of salt. This group is hardly an influential one when it comes to the awards race.

Also nominated here are Animated Short shortlisters Paperman, The Longest Daycare, and Head Over Heals.

Best Animated Feature
Brave – Pixar Animation Studios
Frankenweenie – The Walt Disney Studios
Hotel Transylvania – Sony Pictures Animation
ParaNorman – Focus Features
Rise of the Guardians – DreamWorks Animation
The Pirates! Band of Misfits – Aardman Animations
The Rabbi’s Cat – GKIDS
Wreck-It Ralph – Walt Disney Animation Studios

Review - ParaNorman

Taking cues from their own deliciously creepy Coraline from 2009, the animation studio Laika Entertainment serves up another stop-motion spooker for kids, the often charmingly macabre ParaNorman.

Kodie Smit-McPhee (The Road) voices the spiky-haired misfit Norman, a low-key loner with a peculiar knack for communicating with the dead. Maligned and tormented by his peers and even family, Norman escapes their harsh judgments by watching cheap zombie flicks and indulging in conversations with his late grandmother. His sixth sense may cause him troubles, but it comes in handy when an ancient witch's curse raises a septet of pilgrim corpses from the grave, and only he has the ability to stop it.