Mar 12, 2023

Academy Award Voter Admits He “Really Doesn't Care” About Nominated Animated Feature Films

Today is Academy Awards Day, the one day a year when Hollywood must grit its teeth and act like it respects and appreciates animation.

As I have pointed out many times before, members of the Academy (i.e., Hollywood) have a barely disguised contempt for our corner of the film world.

That sad truth has been easily confirmed in recent years thanks to The Hollywood Reporter, which polls random Academy members about which films they voted for in each category. This year, they have only talked to two Academy members so far, and their answers regarding the animated feature category are about as nonsensical as we could expect.

The first person THR spoke to turned out to be a male member of the Academy's 648-member Producer Division. This person bluntly stated that he did not care about any of the five nominated animated feature films. Here is his full comment:

I watched at least some of all of them - some of them full-length - and none of them really mattered. My favorite animated film of the year, “Luck,” was not even nominated.

But to this producer's credit, he abstained from voting in the category. This is actually an improvement over the more common Academy member who asks his children to suggest winning films in the animated feature category.

The second Academy member THR spoke to, a male member of the 867-member short and feature animation category, offered a far more troubling answer. He voted for Guillermo del Toro's “Pinocchio”:

“I haven't seen ‘Kaiju’ or ‘Marcel the Shoeless Shell’. I liked “Turning Red”. If Guillermo del Toro had not made “Pinocchio” this year, “Puss in Boots” would have deserved the award. I loved Guillermo, I loved the animation, I loved the way he told the story.

The fact that this person voted without seeing the films in the category is more disconcerting than someone who didn't vote because they weren't interested in the work. This is because here is a member of the only one of the Academy's 17 divisions that is supposed to actually respect and appreciate animation. The fact that I couldn't bring myself to even look at the films in the category I represent says almost everything there is to know about the Academy Awards.

If disappointed anime lovers can take any solace, it is that these same voters are not only ignorant about anime, but also about the other categories they are voting for:

If they care about the winners of the Oscars, some of them are voting for categories that pic.twitter.com/DT85TeHwPk

- Brooks Otterlake (@i_zzzz) March 8, 2023