Okay, let's get this out of the way right off the bat.
The Oscars are the worst.
They've always been the worst.
They consistently fail to pick out the most important, influential, or impressive films of each year
for awards, or even for consideration.
I mean, how many of you watching this right now have seen or even heard of Ordinary People?
Nobody talks about it or goes back to rewatch it, like, EVER, yet it won Best Picture in 1980.
And while it's by no means a bad film,
can you really say it's a better, more influential or important film than Raging Bull, which it beat,
or Empire Strikes Back, which wasn't even nominated?
Those movies are taught in film school to this day.
Ordinary People... just isn't.
A lot of Best Picture nominees aren't.
Because all things considered, the Academy is pretty lousy at naming enduring classics.
And they don't need to be great at it, nobody expects them to see the future,
but these are the leading experts in the field of film.
You'd expect them to name something genuinely important for their most prominent award
more than 50% of the time.
Of course, hindsight makes this a lot easier to argue, but even if you look at more recent years,
in 2011, was The King's Speech, a mediocre period drama from a hack music video director
that nobody has watched since that Oscar season,
really a better, more important film than The Social Network, Black Swan, True Grit, The Fighter,
or even Inception?
Let's be real, not by a long shot.
That's because Best Picture isn't really determined by long-term cultural importance.
It's determined by marketing directed at Academy voters,
reflexive guilt over previously-snubbed films and directors,
and the very specific tastes of the Academy itself, which is comprised of a lot of old white guys
who are inclined to like period films about them and their parents' generations,
and navel-gazey Hollywood meta bullshit that's also basically about them.
Similar problems exist for basically all of the categories.
The Academy Awards are not a metric for judging the quality of films,
the only thing that they measure is how much films pander to the Academy's tastes.
But some categories are even worse run than others, and animation is maybe the worst of all,
because there's no complex underlying bias that skews the results there,
most of the voters just don't care.
A lot of fuss has been made about the nomination of two films for Best Animated Feature this year;
Ferdinand and The Boss Baby,
which beat out, among many other great films, A Silent Voice, Mary and the Witch's Flower,
Kizumonogatari, that stupid fucking fireworks movie where kids don't know how to use Google,
and yes, even the undisputed classic Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale.
So how the hell did this travesty happen?
Best Animated Feature is often called "The Pixar Award," because, well, Pixar almost always wins it.
And Pixar almost always wins for the simple reason that, for most of the Academy voters,
the big Pixar movie of the year is the only animated film that their kids can actually drag them to see.
They don't give two shits about animation as an art form, and a lot of them don't even bother
to watch all the nominees before mindlessly casting their votes in the category.
This is how a legitimately broken mess of a film like Brave
can end up beating amazing movies like ParaNorman and Wreck-It Ralph,
how Charlie Kaufman's surreal head-trip Anomalisa got passed up
for the decent, but decidedly conventional Inside Out,
and how fucking Frozen managed to top The Wind Rises.
It doesn't matter how much better the other nominees might be,
the Academy voters never bother to watch them in the first place.
The only years that anything halfway unique has a chance of winning
are the years when Disney and Pixar either don't release something, or put out a sequel.
Or they put out something like Cars.
And even then, with Disney essentially producing their own Pixar movies with musical numbers
under their own brand, the chances have gotten even slimmer for the rest of the field.
But until this year, actually good films were at least getting nominated.
I mean, sure, anime only ever gets a nod when Studio Ghibli puts a new film out,
and sure, The Lego Movie is arguably the worst Oscar snub of all time,
but with the exception of Brave, Cars, Shark Tale, Surf's Up, and Bolt,
every nominee to date has at least deserved to be in the running.
That's because previously, the nominees were selected by a handful of animation professionals
who actually care about the art form and know what they're talking about.
But for the 2018 Awards, nominations were opened up to be decided by all of the voters.
All of the voters who think that animation is just for kids,
and don't bother to watch anything that's not advertised on American TV.
Ferdinand is not a good movie.
Boss Baby, surprisingly, is pretty okay,
but it's nowhere near the top five best animated pictures released this year.
The only reason that either of these titles is in the running is that
one, they're produced by huge American studios with big marketing budgets,
and two, they were stunt cast with famous leads to grab mainstream audience attention,
so voters actually had a chance of seeing them,
as opposed to anime films that barely make it out here at all.
I can all but guarantee you that the "Cookies are for closers" line from Boss Baby
is a major reason that it's sitting on this list.
The Academy may not respect animation, or animators, or special effects artists,
or anyone who works on a technical, computer-oriented job in film, really,
but they sure as hell respect Hollywood-targeted inside jokes.
That much explains why two mediocre at best films could sneak their way into the top of this category,
but why is it specifically so hard for anime to pull out a win, or even earn a nomination?
After all, Japan is the biggest producer of traditionally animated films in the world.
They put out at least one serious contender in the category almost every year.
The Girl Who Lept Through Time, Summer Wars, Wolf Children, The Boy and the Beast,
Paprika, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Tekkonkinkreet, Redline, Sword of the Stranger,
A Letter to Momo, Mindgame, Welcome to the Space Show, 5 Centimeters per Second, and Your Name
were all released after the Best Animated Feature category was created.
All of them were better than films that did get nominated,
or even came out in years with only three nominees, yet they all got snubbed.
Only Studio Ghibli has ever managed to secure a nomination,
and even then, they only actually won one time.
Again, when Pixar wasn't trying.
So what gives?
We've already established that the Academy is very Hollywood-centric.
They like giving awards to Hollywood-produced films and films that reference the Hollywood lifestyle,
even in categories that they don't particularly care about.
So they just don't really acknowledge the output of other countries, or hell, even other states.
They treat Laika up in Oregon like they're a foreign power.
You basically never see more than two foreign films up for Best Animated Picture.
2015 was the rare exception when foreign nominees outnumbered Hollywood productions,
and of course, the only actual Hollywood film on the list was the one that won.
Call it national pride, or simply a desire to keep their hometown as the heart of the film industry,
the Academy is a pack of Hollywood so-and-so's,
and they like to pretend Hollywood is the only place that matters.
Small wonder, then, that Ghibli is the only anime studio to ever get a nomination.
They're the only studio whose films are distributed in North America by Disney.
They cast big-name Hollywood talent, regardless of their actual ability to voice-act, in the dubs,
and give the films wide, if short, theatrical runs,
so Academy voters actually have a snowball's chance in hell of seeing them,
and when they give them a nod, they're still supporting some of their own.
Funimation, Sentai, and other dedicated anime distributors are upstarts in their eyes,
nobodies peddling cartoons who don't deserve to stand on a big, shiny stage
with people whose parents made really important advancements in the art of film a long time ago.
Aside from that, only important foreign animated pictures that have made waves
at big respected international events like Cannes are given any consideration whatsoever.
These festivals, which are respected only because they have similar global prestige to the Academy already,
are really the only other source of foreign nominees.
Which is still good, at least it gives a few great films
like The Breadwinner and the stunningly beautiful Loving Vincent a chance to lose to Coco,
which is one of the best Pixar films in years, to be clear,
I- I don't want to sound like I'm hating on it just because they win every year.
Animation has come a long way in the last two decades,
propelled forward by passionate artists who love the medium.
But this list of nominees serves as a reminder that it's still not seen as a serious art form
by many of the people at the top of the Hollywood food chain.
Fortunately, lack of respect from Hollywood hasn't stopped these creators from making great films,
and it's not about to stop them now.
Coco will in all likelihood win the animation Oscar this year,
and Boss Baby and Ferdinand will get a place in the showcase,
but in our hearts, we all know that the real best animated film of 2017 is:
- "A Silent Voice!"
- "Kizumonogatari!" - "Pokémon: I Choose You!"
- "Mary and the Witch's Flower!" - "Heaven's Feel!"
- "NO! It's Ordinal Scale!"
- "Your Name!"
- "That didn't even come out this year, asshole!"
- "FUCK YOU!!"
Yeah, I'm sure you all have your own opinions about which anime films were the best this year,
and I'd love to hear that in the comments below.
And while you're down there, don't forget to hit subscribe and join the notification squad
to catch every video I make.
By the way, if you'd like to support an anime film more directly,
VIZ and Fathom Events are screening Mazinger Z: INFINITY nationwide on February 11th and 12th.
If you want to see the film for yourself, you can either go to the link in the dooblydoo,
or go to my Twitter and retweet the post linking to this video
for a chance to win a pair of tickets to a screening near you courtesy of my friends at VIZ.
My twitter, by the way, is @G0ffThew.
Or, if you want to hear me talk about anime films some more, click here to see me analyze the OP of Your Name
or click here for something else that YouTube thinks you should watch,
and subscribe to my second channel for my podcast, the Weebcast, and other cool stuff.
I'm Geoff Thew, professional shitbag, signing out from my mother's basement.