The annual Academy Awards were held last night and in a night dominated by Slumdog Millionaire it was fairly slim pickings for comics and SF based films in the major categories (best actors, director, film) with only the pretty much expected posthumous Best Supporting Actor Oscar win for the late Heath Ledger for his portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight flying the flag, albeit a rather sad flag at half-mast (for all my cynicism concerning whether he would have won so many film awards for the Batman film had such a tragedy not occurred – not to detract from his terrific performance, jsut that comic-based films rarely get nods in these categories – its still a bloody awful way to win and must have been awfully stressful for his family). On a related note the BBC reported that the first Heath Ledger Scholarship, designed to give upcoming Australian actors help to break into Hollywood, was awarded last week, to Oliver Ackland, who some may recall was in the intriguing, downbeat Aussie ‘Western’ The Proposition. Elsewhere comics and SF films did well – as they often do – in the behind-the-scenes categories, with Benjamin Button picking up wins in several categories such as Make-up, Art Direction and Visual Effects and The Dark Knight winning Sound Editing.
On the animation front it was a pretty mainstream field consisting of Bolt, Kung Fu Panda and Wall-E, with the latter earning Pixar another little golden man statuette. I certainly don’t begrudge Wall-E winning – as I’ve said before here I really enjoyed it and I greatly admired the sheer skill on show in giving a huge amount of character to mostly wordless stars. I think the only thing that disappoints me is that the three contenders all seemed to me to be more ‘best box office’ rather than best animation. However on the short animation list there was much more interesting material to be enjoyed (in my not at all humble opinion), with the Oscar going to Japanese work La Maison en Petit Cubes by Kunio Katô, which came already commended by several animation festivals, including the highly respected Annecy festival. Sadly, as is all too often the case with films in this category, I haven’t been able to actually see the whole short animation and as the official site is in Japanese I couldn’t pick up much more information on it, so I’ll just have to cross my fingers and hope it turns up at the Edinburgh Film Festival so I get to see it. Its always such a shame that outside of festivals most audiences simply don’t get to see the bulk of the films generating a buzz at the fests and the awards ceremonies; meantime here’s a brief, but rather lovely clip (using a lot of the old traditional hand drawing on paper approach too, according to the Annecy site):
[youtube G8g5_-F-1L8]
Mon, Feb 23, 2009
Art and animation, Awards, Film, TV and radio