No one thinks the Academy Awards are perfect. Except maybe the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences; they probably think they do a bang-up job year after year. Every now and then, however, they do end up throwing the right kind of love to the right kind of movie, and this year’s unquestionably worthy tip-of-the-hat went to Pixar’s Up by way of a nomination for Best Picture. And by accounts both quantitative (8.4 rating on IMDb; a 98% Fresh consensus on Rotten Tomatoes) and qualitative (it has anyone with a soul hooked by their tear ducts 20 minutes in), it absolutely deserves the recognition. There is one tiny, nagging little catch, though: Up was also nominated for Best Animated Feature.
Now, it’s obviously deserving of the Best Animated Feature nomination as it was indeed one of the best animated features of 2009. But doesn’t its contention for one award render the other a done deal? If Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Princess and the Frog and The Secret of Kells were all found to lack the mettle for a Best Picture slot, of which there are now 10 vacancies, is it not a forgone conclusion that Up is the winner of the Animated Feature category?
Of course, this logic doesn’t apply to all Best Picture nominations. Just because something is in the running for Best Picture doesn’t mean that it also must have had the Best Editing, Best Screenplay, Best Makeup, Best ‘For Your Consideration’ Campaign, and on and on. It’s forgivable that a film win Best Picture but none of the other fundamental or technical awards, because we all understand that each of those represents a single aspect of filmmaking while the last award of the night is in honor of the sum of a film’s parts. However, Best Animated Feature is, in theory, a wholly owned subsidiary of Best Picture since both honor the sum of a film’s parts. Think of it this way: If one were to draw a Venn Diagram of the two categories, it would look like a small circle (Animated) had been swallowed by a bigger circle (Picture).
It’s an unprecedented collision, actually. The only other animated film to ever be put up for Best Picture was Beauty and the Beast in 1991, a decade before the Best Animated Feature designation came into being. However, a comparable clash happened in 2000 when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon took home Best Foreign Language Film while losing the big crown to Gladiator. Considering the former is a far superior film than the latter, it stands to reason that voting Academy members knew it would win Foreign Language so they treated its other nomination as a mere formality. Sadly, it seems more than reasonable that the exact same thing is going to happen this year with Up.
And that’s not the only way the Academy Awards have inadvertently shafted Pixar’s wondrous baby. Up is one of the few Best Picture nominees that should have been a lock for one of the five slots, but now that the cache has doubled in size, its inclusion is diluted. It has now fallen under the same piteous shadow that The Blind Side, District 9, Precious and a few more find themselves in. In any other year they probably wouldn’t have made it to varsity, but because the bench grew longer, these nods come across as blatant attempts to include popular, well-respected mainstream movies in the Best Pic category.
Seeing as the broadcast ratings for the Academy Awards ceremony have been on a downward spiral for years now, it’s understandable that they’d finally try to nominate films general moviegoers have not only heard of but might have actually seen. But if they’re going to change the Best Picture parameters, they need to amend a few other categories as well, so as to avoid this regrettable, though probably not intentional, shafting in the future. If a film is ever nominated for Best Picture it should be excluded from both the Animated Feature and Foreign Language categories. Those two subdomains exist to recognize a niche and if a film receives a Best Picture nomination that means it has transcended its niche.
Unfortunately, that’s likely not how voters will see it. It’s nice that the Academy has shown how Up does indeed transcend its animation niche by honoring it with Best Picture consideration, but in doing so they’ve also scuttled any chance of it winning the award. Or, in the words of Up’s cantankerous hero Carl, “This is crazy. I finally meet my childhood hero and he’s trying to kill us. What a joke.”
