So... that happened. Wall-E won best picture at the LAFCA. Now a critics award was always going to be in Wall-E's future, and they aren't always strong Oscar indicators... but this is the Los Angeles Film Critics Assosciation. It's not only important because of its geography, but because of its "dead-on-balls" accuracy (in the words of Mona Lisa Vito).
Want some stats? How about this- 28 out of the last 34 LAFCA winners have gone on to a BP nomination. In other words Wall-E has a better than 4 to 1 chance of getting a nomination for Best Picture.
Now the film's status as Animated would seem to dampen its chances quite a bit, but it doesn't rule it out in my mind. Take for example the somewhat recent nominations for Life is Beautiful and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (another LAFCA winner) despite the existance of a Foreign Language Film Category. Also, Wall-E could become the recipient of a nomination because of the overall excellent body of work of Pixar.
Whatever the reason Wall-E and Eve (EVAH!) have reason to pop in that Hello Dolly tape and dance around to "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" because their awards chances just got a majory boost.
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2 comments:
Do you think the overall strength of the animated features this year will have anything to do with that? For instance, because of the existence of such critically acclaimed animated features as Waltz for Bashir, Bolt and even (to an extent) Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar 2, does it make it easier to overlook Wall-E for animated feature and harder to overlook it for the BP? We talked about this at a restaurant last year in regard to last year's eventual best animated winner.
Furthermore, shouldn't the best picture award really be about the best picture, whether foreign, animated, comedy or documentary instead of just narrative drama? It's beginning to be a bit of a problem now that the "black sheep" movies are just as good as the usual contenders.
Good Point. Maybe if the field of animated film is seen as an art form close to the same level as that of live-action, american, feature length, fiction films then maybe Wall-E can crack through like some Foreign films have in the past and maybe some documentaries may in the future. The strong slate this year might help it out.
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