Academy Award/YMMV

• Animated Movies
  • Feature-length animated films have typically been snubbed by the Academy, largely as a result of the Animation Age Ghetto. A turnaround was effected in the Nineties, where the songs of animated films were regularly honored (for a few years the Best Score category was split into Drama and Musical or Comedy categories because voters were lumping songs in with the underscores, leaving worthy non-musicals unhonored), and Beauty and the Beast, was nominated for a Best Picture statue in 1991 (to date, it is the first of just two three animated films to receive that honor). In recognition of this, the Academy recently created a Best Animated Feature award, with the apparent intention of keeping animated films out of the major nominations, since they can just have a "Best Animated Feature" label slapped on and everyone can call it a day (Remember, the Academy is an organization mostly composed of the live action film industry - the animators in it are heavily outnumbered by the rest of Hollywood.) On the other hand, after the recent expansion to 10 nominees and Up's subsequent Best Picture nod, things may be looking... well, up. (Foreign-language and documentary features also have separate awards and a similar tough time breaking through to other categories; the latter never got one, the former hasn't had one since 2001's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.^[1]) While there is no animated feature nominated for Best Picture, the Best Animated Feature Oscar is now a standard category, whereas previously it had to be consciously activated by the awards committee each year.
    • However, the Spanish language film Biutiful did garner Javier Bardem a Best Actor nomination in 2010, and The Separation has been nominated for Best Original Screenplay for 2011, so this might be changing.
  • This led to many people to cry foul with the 2009 Oscar nominations, where the only other film of 2008 that was as well-reviewed and beloved by audiences as The Dark Knight -- WALL-E -- was shoved into the Best Animated Film category and didn't receive a nomination for Best Picture (Dark Knight was denied a nomination as well). The outcry from critics and Oscar viewers alike over Dark Knight and WALL-E getting snubbed is likely the major contributing factor to the Academy's decision to raise the amount of Best Picture nominees for the 2010 Oscars to ten rather then five.
  • Also not helping was the fact that animated films suffered a downswing by the time the award actually showed up in 2001. This led to an unpleasant situation in 2004 where the dreadful Shark Tale received a nomination. It's also why no Disney Animated Canon film has yet won the award; the category arrived just as they hit their latest Dork Age.
  • As a side note: only one traditionally animated film -- Spirited Away -- has won the Best Animated Feature Film award. With the exception of Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (done in Claymation), every other winner has been a CGI film.
  • What the Academy defines as being "animated" is also rather unclear -- see the recent case of Waltz with Bashir, nominated as Best Foreign Language Film instead. Techniques like rotoscoping (used as far back as the 1920s) and Serkis Folk aren't considered "real" animation, and as a result the films which use them aren't considered for the award.
• Big blockbusters rarely get a look-in for the major awards. James Bond movies will get at least onto the long-list for the effects and music awards. For the record, there have only been seven cases of actual Oscar nominations for them (the last for the Theme Tune of For Your Eyes Only) and only two wins (Goldfinger for sound effects, Thunderball for visual effects).
  • Cubby Broccoli eventually got a lifetime achievement award.
  • The 2009 awards show introduced the Film Yearbook, which has montages (yes, more montages) highlighting genres that are usually overlooked by the Academy (Comedy, Action, Animation) or the audience (Documentaries), or just because (Romance, which concluded that WALL-E was the most romantic movie of the year). It is a reminder that, as someone said, "The Oscars are about all movies, not just the nominated ones."

1. ↑ Letters From Iwo Jima is in Japanese, but an American production, doesn't count