Oscar Predictions: The Shorts

I love the short film nominees. Honest I do, especially since it's become (relatively) easier to actually see them before the Oscars. But their increased availability -- whether through streaming or the annual Shorts HD theatrical package -- has made predicting them an exercise in masochism. It seems every time you think you have the Academy's patterns down in these categories, they always find some new way to subvert your expectations, and popular logic always seems to fly in the face of your gut instinct once you've seen them for yourself.

But predict them we do, and if I can ever manage to get any one out of the three of them right, I usually consider that a successful year. So check out out my picks after the cut. How poorly will I do?

Best Animated Short

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:

One Category at a Time: Animated Short

As always, the shorts are a unique and seldom disappointing viewing experience, boasting an international potpourri of content. All but one of the live-action entries are multilingual, and the animated efforts are striking for the variety of media on display. I hope that Shorts HD continues doing what it's doing. It's never been easier for audiences to preview these once uninvestable categories before the show. Predicting winners, however, is still about as head-scratching as it ever was. Best we can do is rule a handful of titles out.

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: Animated Short

Year in and year out, this is always one of my favourite categories, boasting a wonderfully diverse array of styles that make it well worth your time to seek out the Oscar Shorts program that brings them to theatres. While I still lament that Glen Keane's stunning Duet was left on the sidelines (ditto Bill Plympton's trippy Footprints), there's still lots to enjoy in the five toons that made 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.

'Boxtrolls' leads ANNIE Award nominations

The New York critics weren't the only ones sounding off this Monday, as ASIFA-Hollywood released their loooong list of nominees. Laika's The Boxtrolls hauled in 13 nominations, the most of any contender in the field. Clearly there's a lot of respect for the craft, and rightly so.

Not too far behind with ten nominations of its own was DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon 2, which would be my preference for the win, but I'm not getting my hopes too high. There's a logical argument to be made that the hipness of The LEGO Movie will lead it to victory this season. We shall see.

The Best Animated Short category, meanwhile, features five of the contenders on the Oscar shortlist.

Check out all the film nominees after the cut, with some subjective commentary:

Animated Shorts finalists give me a firm rooting interest...

Normally, when the Academy announces its shortlist of Animated Short contenders, a handful of them can already be found online. This year, the only readily available one is Duet, by legendary Disney character animator Glen Keane. And I can tell you right now that I'm rooting for him all the way.

Not that I necessarily think his elegantly simple 3-and-a-half minute short will be the best (some of his competition looks equally impressive), but the simple fact that it's Keane -- the man who breathed palpable life into Ariel, the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and Rapunzel -- who would be credited with the Oscar is enough for me to throw all my cheering power behind it.

Oscar Postmortem Pt. 1: The results

I ended the year with the same numbers I did last year: 19 out of 24 categories correct. That may be just slightly below the average being scored by most pundits this year (who are mostly 20 or higher), but I'm satisfied with it. Let's take a look at just a few of the winners (and losers, but we'll try not to be too mean about it!) after the cut:

One... er, Three Categories at a Time: The Shorts

For the last several years, Shorts International has done an excellent job at bringing the Oscar nominated short to theatres and other online outlets so that ordinary plebeians like myself can actually see all the entries in these once marginalized categories. There's something to be said for the creative liberation that many filmmakers enjoy when working with a shorter format, and this year's strong crop of mini-movies certainly verifies that. At the end of the day, good storytelling knows no length.

Frozen leads Annie Award winners

Frozen won five ANNIE Awards tonight including Best Animated Feature, further solidifying its stranglehold on the Oscar. But as the ANNIEs have been more prone to doing in recent years since adjusting their voting system, the wealth was spread out a bit. Monsters University won a pair and The Croods won three. Even The Wind Rises surprisingly popped up as the winner for Best Writing.

Over in the Short Subjects category, Oscar frontrunner Get a Horse won the day, so make of that what you will. Seems like as decent an Oscar prediction as any.

Check out the feature film winners after the cut.

Review - Frozen

Casual moviegoers with kids to entertain for an hour or so can be forgiven for thinking that the latest animated effort from Walt Disney Studios is little more than a slapsticky romp about an impish snowman. That is, after all, the only clue they've been given by the TV ads and movie posters, but those only represent the tip of the proverbial ice berg. With Frozen, Disney actually makes as earnest an attempt as they have in the last 15 years to recapture the magic of their 1990s musical heyday, with a Broadway pedigree cast and not one, but two new Disney princesses front and centre.

The story, written by Shane Morris and co-directors Jennifer Lee & Chris Buck, is based very loosely on Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen, although its vague Scandinavian setting seems to be all that was retained from Anderson's original 19^th century fable. This re-imagining tells of two princesses in the fictional land of Arendelle. Elsa, the eldest and therefore first in line to inherit the crown, was born with the magical ability to form ice and snow with the slightest gesture. Anna, the youngest, adores frolicking in the indoor winter wonderlands her sister can conjure, until a near-death accident convinces their parents that the girls should be separated and Elsa's powers kept under wraps.

Annie nominations kick off a crowded December

It must be December, because lists of nominations, top tens, and critics' superlatives are officially upon us. Today, ASIFA-Hollywood dropped their bloated slate of nominees for the 41st Annie Awards, and the Golden Satellite nominations were announced. If those two groups don't quite have you titillated (neither of them move the needle much in terms of influence on the awards race), then look forward to the coming days when we can expect announcements from the New York critics, LA critics, and the National Board of Review.

But back to the Annies...

In the feature film categories, Monsters University and the likely Oscar frontrunner Frozen lead the way with ten nominations. Following with nine are The Croods and Despicable Me 2 (no, I'm not inclined to count the latter's short film Puppy or its nominated TV commercial towards its total).

Speaking of shorts, the only ones to pop up both here and on the Academy's shortlist are Disney's Get A Horse! (the presumed frontrunner), the NFB's Gloria Victoria (a fringe contender if ever there was one), and the BBC's Room on the Broom (from the makers of the 2011 nominated short The Gruffalo). So make of that what you will.

Best Animated Feature

• A Letter to Momo - 
GKIDS
• Despicable Me 2 - 
Universal Pictures
• Ernest & Celestine
 - GKIDS
• Frozen - 
Walt Disney Animation Studios
• Monsters University - 
Pixar Animation Studios
• The Croods
 - DreamWorks Animation
• The Wind Rises
 - The Walt Disney Studios

One Category at a Time: Animated Short

Oh, if only it were a normal year! Best Animated Short would be so much easier to predict if only it were a normal year! But as we've been observing throughout the season, this Oscar year is anything but normal, and that abnormality extends to the arena of live-action and animated short films. For the first time ever, they are being sent on screeners to Academy members, all of whom are now welcome to vote, going by nothing more than the honour system that they did indeed watch the nominated films.

Some of the logic guiding pundits through the Animated Short race (filled with delights on a yearly basis) is that block voting will benefit studio entries like Paperman and Maggie Simpson in “The Longest Daycare”, whereas the old voting system would certainly have been more advantageous to lengthier and more artistically rendered fare like Head Over Heels or Adam & Dog.

Academy rule change in three categories

DVD screeners are being sent out with the nominees for Best Documentary Feature, Live-Action Short, and Animated Short to all Academy members, eliminating the necessity to attend official screenings in order to vote them, although screenings are still being held.

How will this rule change affect the voting dynamic in these oft marginalized categories? Will it open the door for more populist fare to finally triumph over artistic fringe contenders? For instance, studio efforts haven't won Best Animated Short in years, so maybe this is good news for Disney's Paperman, one of the most breathtaking filmmaking displays of 2012. Does this help popular Best Documentary contender Searching for Sugar Man tighten its stranglehold on the Oscar? We shall see.

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

Animated Short race gets a Shortlist

Best Animated Short is always one of my favourite fringe categories at the Oscars, often serving up an eclectic cross-section of cultural and technical styles. Most years yield a richly diverse lineup of nominees, and this year's roster will be selected from the following ten titles:

The Eagleman Stag - Mikey Please, Benedict Please
Head Over Heels - Timothy Reckart, Fodhla Cronin O'Reilly
Paperman - John Kahrs
Dripped - Leo Verrier
Adam and Dog - Minkyu Lee
Combustible - Katsuhiro Otomo
The Fall of the House of Usher - Raul Garcia, Stephan Roelants
Tram - Michaela Pavlatova, Ron Dyens
Fresh Guacamole - PES
Maggie Simpson in “The Longest Daycare" - David Silverman

Some of these are viewable on the web. I've seen five of the ten, three of which look good enough to make the cut (Paperman, The Eagleman Stag, and Dripped) and two of which seem unlikely (Fresh Guacamole and The Longest Daycare). We'll reassess the playing field once nominations are announced.

One... er, Three Categories at a Time: The Shorts

Thanks to Shorts International and Magnolia Pictures, all the nominees for Oscar's least exposed categories do get to see the light of day in select theatres, allowing us mere mortal Oscar pundits to make more informed (but not more accurate) predictions than we ever could before. In the interest of conciseness, I'm only going to briefly highlight the contenders of each race in a few quick blurbs. It's best not to over analyze these categories. There's no telling how the voters will lean any given year.

Rango triumphs at Annie Awards

To the Annies' credit, they did a not-so-bad job of spreading the wealth at their annual awards. The Dreamworks-dominated voting body turned out to be more of a non-factor, chalking up only two wins for Kung Fu Panda 2 and nothing for Puss in Boots. Rango took five awards, including Best Animated Feature and Best Writing. Tintin, Rio, Winnie the Pooh, and Arthur Christmas also walked away with hardware in hand.

For kicks, I actually watched the show on live stream, and Oh. My. Lord. What an unmitigated train-wreck. Host Patton Oswalt was clearly having much more fun than anyone else in the room (he did confess to being "so high right now" at one point, but we'll never know if that was just his tongue in his cheek, or a concealed bag of weed). To be fair, he does seem unshakably at home on the stage, and with a bit more structure, I think he'd make a killer awards show host.

Structure, however, was in short supply at this affair. Bill Nighy was announced winner of the award for voice acting, only to walk out of the hall and never return! Tweets abound that he was in the bathroom at the time. True or not, he certainly wasn't in the room, leaving presenters Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall clumsily killing time while everyone waited. They eventually moved on, as Nighy made no appearance. Funnier still, the award was for Arthur Christmas, but they played the theme music from the PBS children's cartoon series Arthur.

I thought things couldn't possibly get more awkward than that, but the next presenter proceeded to read the winner for Best Preschool TV Program from the wrong envelope! This led to a confusing delay that was both hilarious and excruciating, while Patton himself marched out on stage to sort things out. Co-presenter Jason Marsden, meanwhile, delighted in photographing the awkward situation with his iPhone.

These are only the highlights from a shoddily put together evening. The whole thing kinda makes me appreciate the oft-maligned Oscars a little more. I may have high-standard complaints about the show every year, but at least it's done professionally.

Anyway, full list of feature film winners after the cut.

ANNIE nominees (there sure are a lot this year!)

The animation academy never fails to impress me with their irrelevance. As though their blatant Dreamworks predisposition isn't conspicuous enough, they've now gone and produced a slate of nominees by far more enormous than any they've produced before, and in what I consider to be the weakest year for animation in half a decade. Still, they're the only major awards body for the medium, so it bears acknowledgment.

It also bears acknowledgment that despite such a long Best Animated Feature shortlist, Rango is the only one that also grabbed nods for Writing and Directing. Is it still the frontrunner after all these months? I didn't love it by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly bests most of its fellow nominees (not that I've seen all of them yet).

Best Animated Feature

A Cat in Paris – Folimage
Arrugas (Wrinkles) - Perro Verde Films, S.L.
Arthur Christmas – Sony Pictures Animation, Aardman Animations
Cars 2 – Pixar Animation Studios
Chico & Rita – Chico & Rita Distribution Limited
Kung Fu Panda 2 – DreamWorks Animation
Puss In Boots – DreamWorks Animation
Rango – Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies
Rio – Blue Sky Studios
Tintin – Amblin Entertainment, Wingnut Films and Kennedy/Marshall

Best Animated Short Subject

Adam and Dog – Lodge Films
I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat – Warner Bros. Animation
La Luna – Pixar Animation Studios
(Notes on) Biology – Ornana Films
Paths of Hate – Platige Image
Sunday – National Film Board of Canada
The Ballad of Nessie –Walt Disney Animation Studios
The Girl and the Fox – Base14
Wild Life – National Film Board of Canada and Studio GDS