An Interesting Year for Animation at the Oscars

This is certainly shaping up to be an interesting year for the little golden guy. We have a very good chance that Heath ledger will win an Oscar post-mortem. We have the hearth-throb Aussie hosting the ceremony and an alleged renewed attempt to shorten the ceremony’s length and bring more “fun and excitement” back to the program.

With all that said, one of the more interesting elements to the 81st Annual Academy Awards is the significance that animated films will potentially play. Two films in particular have been getting a lot of attention, and for good reason. ‘WALL-E’ and ‘Waltz with Bashir’ are both incredible films, but the buzz is centered more around “how” they’re being recognized.

‘WALL-E’ will obviously be nominated for Best Animated Feature and it’s difficult to make any argument against it’s seemingly shoe-in status for the Oscar. However, the film is also looking to possibly be nominated for Best Screenplay as well. On top of this, and while it’s something of a long shot in my opinion, ‘WALL-E’ has even been getting some support for a nod as Best Picture. Personally, while I absolutely loved the film, I have a fundamental issue with an animated movie winning Best Picture. Now, I’m pretty sure I’m not just imagining this, but this has happened before with a Disney movie… I think. Even so, it’s been quite some time since we’ve seen this happen.

‘Waltz with Bashir’ is an Israeli documentary that happens to be animated. What’s fascinating to me about this one is that it’s not only eligible to be nominated for Best Animated Feature and Best Foreign Film, but it’s also eligible to be nominated for Best Documentary Feature. For the life of me, I cannot recall one single other situation where this scenario has come up. It would certainly be a first for it to be nominated in all three categories, but how cool would it be to win them too? Then again, it’s not likely to beat out ‘WALL-E’ for Best Animated Feature.

What do you think? Should these two films be getting the nominations being touted or are the voting members going too far? What are your picks? Let us know by leaving your comments on this post.