One Category at a Time: Best Animated Feature

The Academy's animation branch saw a record number of submissions this year for Best Animated Feature consideration, which makes it a tad surprising that the final five were so easy to predict, and that the race for the win has been such a non-contest for so many months.

My Award Nominations: Animated Feature

I know, I know, only four nominees seems super lazy in a year which saw record submissions for the Oscar, but I promise if I eventually catch up with other 2016 toons that I like well enough I shall retroactively add them to the ballot.

Annie Award Winners

I didn't even realize that the ANNIEs were happening this weekend. I guess you lose track of these things when the Oscar race for Best Animated Feature seems like such a done deal. ASIFA-Hollywood did little to sway my prediction by handing their top prize (among many others) to Zootopia, but they spread some wealth to Moana and Kubo. They even handed prizes to three of the five Oscar nominees for Animated Short, making that category even tougher to gauge.

List of movie winners after the cut:

Good Times Keep Rolling for 'La La Land' with PGA Win

La La Land continued its precursor dominance last night with the Producers Guild of America's top award. Zootopia and O.J.: Made in America also continued their similar dominance in the corresponding animation and documentary categories.

ACE Eddie Winners, and PGA/SAG Preview

To the surprise of precisely no one, La La Land won the ACE Eddie Award last night for Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy). Tom Cross is likely en route to his second Oscar in three years.

The Dramatic Feature category was a bit more competitive, but prevailing pundit logic of Joe Walker's editorial of Arrival winning out proved to be correct. Can't argue with either of these winners. For me, they're easily the top two editing achievements of the year, with everything else eating their dust.

Producers Guild Names Ten

The Producers Guild of America listed their nominees today for Outstanding Feature Production. They mostly followed the status quo, save for the audacious inclusion of Deadpool.

Even by 'token blockbuster' standards, Deadpool's persistent presence thus far this season has been surprising. Chalk it up in part to the Critics Choice Awards turning themselves into the Ryan Reynolds show, followed by its finalist status on the Best Makeup shortlist. But this nomination from the PGA is not all that surprising. They usually reserve one slot for a box office movie.

The ten are:

Arrival
Deadpool
Fences
Hacksaw Ridge
Hell or High Water
Hidden Figures
La La Land
Lion
Manchester by the Sea
Moonlight

ACE Eddie nominations

It's going to be a busy two weeks of guild nominations and precursors, starting today with the American Cinema Editors (discussed after the cut), and continuing all the way to next Thursday (the 12th) with the Directors Guild. Polls for Oscar nominations, by the way, will close the very next day.

Critics groups have made it clear that the two horses they'd back are Moonlight and La La Land, which (by no coincidence) are also the only two yours truly would consider voting for as Best Picture of 2016. That's the thing about weak years: It makes it real easy for consensus to form around the few truly great movies that materialize.

Both seem likely to win the respective categories where they were nominated by the editors' guild, but let's take a quick survey of the other contenders...

Review - Kubo and the Two Strings

EDITOR'S NOTE: Not a return to full reviews for me, I'm afraid. Just an exercise to shake some of the rust off. It'll be back to capsules for awards season movies.

In a bustling village square, in some unnamed era of pre-Imperial Japan, a boy wearing an eye-patch and a baggy samurai robe drops a pile of paper on the ground and strums a power chord on his shamisen. As though by instinct, the crowd turns, silences, and gathers 'round with barely-contained excitement.
“If you must blink, do it now,” instructs Kubo (for that is his name), literally commanding the attention of his audience.

As he plucks the strings and taps harmonic on his instrument, his paper springs to life, folding itself into intricate figurines that run, jump, fly and do pantomimed battle with each other, acting out the drama as Kubo narrates a tale of adventure and heroism for the delighted onlookers.

We are (shrewdly) given no explanation of this sorcery, and honestly, we're too bedazzled to care. Just like the throng of villagers rapt by Kubo's paper players, when we sit down to a Laika feature we are being treated to the most elaborate puppet show ever imaginable. Or at least until Laika – the stop-motion animation studio behind this thrilling illusion – imagines a way to make it more yet elaborate for their next trick.

My Awards: Animated Feature

I'm nearing the end of my personal nominations, and today I post my picks for the specialty categories of Foreign, Documentary and Animated Features. Inevitably, there's a fair bit of overlap with AMPAS, as I never get around to catching much more than what's up for the Oscar in these niche arenas.
So, you know, subject to change and all that.

Here are my top options for Best Animated Feature:

Inside Out dominates Annie Awards

While all eyes were on the DGA last night, ASIFA-Hollywood held its annual Annie Awards. It was a great night for Pixar Studios, which scooped every single eligible category, mostly for Inside Out (quelle surprise), although The Good Dinosaur was tossed one very deserving consolation win for its visual effects.

As a nice change, the organization added a category for Independent Feature Animation. Is it a ghetto category? Sure. But small, scarcely distributed animated films would never stand a chance against widely seen studio fare. I'm delighted to see Ale Abreu's wonderful Boy and the World took this prize, and hope that it helps ensure the continued success of international GKIDS pickups in future awards seasons.

Equally delightful was the decision to give Best Animated Short to Don Hertzfedlt's brilliant World of Tomorrow. Fingers crossed for the Oscar!

Check out all the feature film winners after the cut.

One Category at a Time: Best Animated Feature

With a limited number of eligible entries being submitted each year, it's usually no hard task predicting the winner of Best Animated Feature. Last year's contest may have been a nebulous one due to the vacuum created by the shocking omission of The LEGO Movie, but strange circumstances of that ilk are the exception to the rule.

This year we're back to the status quo with a bona fide lock that's entirely deserving of that designation. But first, let's briefly peruse the other nominees, which represent a diverse cross-section of styles and stories. For these four, the true value is the nomination, which will hopefully draw new audiences that might otherwise have passed them by.

Con Job: 'The Big Short' stuns as PGA winner

Well fuck.

The only fraud bigger than the one Wall Street perpetrated against the American public prior to the 2008 housing crisis, is the one The Big Short -- which "smartly" depicts that shameful recent chapter of history -- is pulling over on Hollywood as we speak.

And yet there it stands, as our new Best Picture frontrunner by "virtue" of having won the Producers Guild of America's top prize late last night in Los Angeles. Anyone who claims to have seen this coming is being a revisionist historian. Under no circumstance did this film -- as abrasive, impenetrable and, at its worst, condescending a comedy as you'll likely see -- have the qualities of a consensus pick. It's victory here, and its now inevitable victory at the Oscars, will baffle me for years to come.

Review - Inside Out

Leave it to Pixar – the animation haven that made us believe a rat could cook, and a house could fly, and a robot could fall in love – to make their latest brainchild... well, the brain of a child. Or more specifically, the feelings that make it tick.
As such, Inside Out is the studio's most ambitious concept to date, and also one of its greatest triumphs. This wonderful invention of cinema does more than make you laugh and cry (and it will make you do both); It blithely examines the human condition and what it finds is deceptively profound.

Riley Anderson (voiced by Kaitlyn Diaz) is a perfectly normal, perfectly happy 11-year-old girl. Her early life growing up in Minnesota may seem a bit ordinary on the outside, but her gray matter is anything but gray. Pixar represents it as a bubblegum-tinted world of pure imagination, overseen by the five core emotions – Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger – that literally push her buttons from a command booth in her frontal lobe.

Giving voice to these tiny balls of neurological energy are a quintet of TV comedians who would seem almost too perfectly typecast in a lesser film. It's to their (and the animators') enormous credit that we never get distracted trying to picture the actor behind the caricature.

Top Ten: Pixar Films

I've never committed to a definitive ranking of the films of Pixar Animation. Perhaps having relatively few feature titles under their banner made a top ten list kinda meaningless (although their ever growing roster of memorable characters is always ripe for sorting). Or perhaps the frequently high caliber of their movies made ranking them a more arbitrary exercise than ranking movies already is.

But with raves for their fifteenth feature Inside Out announcing a return to form after a few years of middling success, now seems like a good time to go on record as to which gems sparkle the brightest for me personally. Needless to say, this list is in constant flux and subject to positional shifts at any time – Probably as soon as I see Inside Out!

But which of the studio's first fourteen is on the bubble?...

Early Oscar Predictions: Animated Feature

Animated films are a special case in which the vast majority of the work is carried out in post. Years are often spent on the animation alone, and that's not even taking into account all the other elements such as effects, music and sound.

Walt Disney animation has dominated lately, winning back-to-back Best Animated Feature Oscars and two Best Animated Short Oscars in the last three years, but they have no feature in contention for 2015. With one of the big three American studios sitting it out, one would think that a DreamWorks entry should make the cut, but do Home or B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherwordly Operations really strike anyone as Oscar-worthy? I have my doubts.

Instead, it may be Disney's corporate acquisition Pixar that reclaims some of their lost lustre by double dipping, as for the first time ever they are cranking out two original films in the same year.

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' 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.