The British Academy of Film and Television Arts announced its film awards nominations just this morning. As I think we probably all expected Heath Ledger has a nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category; the Dark Knight also garnered a nod in the Music category, as did Pixar’s Wall-E and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Brad Pitt is in the running in the Leading Actor section for Benjamin Button, David Fincher is in the Director category noms for the film too and Button also picked up a nomination for Eric Roth for Adapted Screenplay.
(a scene from the excellent animated adaptation of Marjan Satrapi’s Persepolis)
Wall-E , Persepolis and Waltz With Bashir are all competing against one another for the Animated Film gong – after a string of recent awards and nomination shortlists for films I’m pleased to see an animation category that isn’t completely dominated by child-friendly, big budget Hollywood productions. Not that I object to those movies (in fact I enjoyed several of them this last year), but it gets depressing to see the same big studio projects on each awards list when there were more challenging and interesting animated works produced, such as Bashir and Persepolis. Both of those are also nominated in the Film Not in the English Language category too, which I have to say I am also quite pleased about.
(some lovely looking artwork from the short animation Codswallop by the Brother McLeod)
The Short Animation category (which traditionally has some damned fine and innovative animation, frequently created by artists working on a shoestring budget) contains one household name – Wallace and Gromit: a Matter of Loaf and Death – and two relatively unknown works (which is the good thing about this category, even a nomination can help raise a new animator’s profile), Codswallop by Greg McLeod and Myles McLeod and Varmints by Sue Goffe and Marc Craste. Varmints, you may recall, was one of DFC cartoonist Sarah McIntyre’s Best of the Year picks recently. Personally I often find the short animation (and the short film) categories to be the most interesting, although annoyingly the nominees are often the hardest to find in a cinema to watch as they are frequently restricted to festival screenings – which, I think, makes it more important we should flag them up and make folks aware of them…
(a rather lovely looking scene from AKA Studios’ Varmints)
The Dark Knight and Benjamim Button picked up further nominations in several of the behind-the-scenes categories such as Production Design, Costume Design and Cinematography. The Visual Effects category was, as we might expect, dominated by the big, blockbuster action movies like The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Quantum of Solace, with Benjamin Button also making this shortlist too. Former Doctor Who star turned screen writer Noel Clarke has has a nomination in the Rising Star category (go, Noel!) – that category is decided by a public vote, so you may want to go and offer up some support to Noel; previous winners of the Rising Star award have included Wanted’s James McAvoy and Bond girl Eva Green. The full BAFTA nominations can be found on the official site; the awards ceremony takes place on February 8th.And while you are on the BAFTA site you might want to check out several video pieces they have up going behind the scenes on Doctor Who, recorded at the Barbican as part of the London Children’s Film Festival.
Thu, Jan 15, 2009
Art and animation, Awards, Film, TV and radio