Wow, once again, there's like a boatload of furriners in this category. Well, no troubles here. I'm open-minded about alternative lifestyles and all that.
I've seen most of these. "I'll Wait For The Next One..." plays like a long-format ad for sugar-free breath mints. "Fait D'Hiver" is hysterically funny; they've basically taken an old joke about a wrong number and turned it into a film that doesn't make the mistake of milking the laughs. But it plays like a long-form ad for cellphones. Really well-shot, though; I got the impression that this was the director's tryout for the bigs. "Use a chinese lantern to light the bathroom shot! Overcrank it when the door swings open! Did someone check the gate? Is the fog machine ready for the shot out the window? Let's GO! We're losing the light!!!"
"The Charming Man" fits the more conventional definition of a Short Film. It's a romantic comedy with a beginning, middle, and an end, and it just goes to show how efficiently you can move the story along when you don't muck things up by giving the guy and the girl quirky friends to confide in.
I am forced to enjoy the remainders via the magic of Google. "Inja" appears to be a tense flick about aparthied, in which a mean-o white landowner tries to get between a cute black kid and his dog. Gotcha. "Johnny Flynton" is a boxing film. Judging from the single frame of film that's reproduced on its website, it's a humdinger. It's also the only nominated short made by uh-Merricans.
Slightly more difficult than Best Short, this. Lots of English-speakers wearing hats from non-English-speaking nations like to claim that they've actually seen most of these and that the experienced changed their life, particularly in light of the more serious subjects and genuine emotion that fill these films, thanks to their distance from the Hollywood Machine…and they keep on talking but at this point I'm just saying "Mmm-hmm" every 11.9 seconds and mentally planning a cloverleaf-shaped tour of Maine that would allow me to see all the sights and be able to return to Wells for breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the Maine Diner.
(It can be done, I'm sure of it. If you sampled their Lobster Pie just once, you'd understand the credibility of this quest. And if you heard the aforementioned bizarrely-toqued film commentator, you'd fail to understand why I didn't jam a nearby wastebasket over his head and saved us both a great deal of effort.)
So nope, I haven't seen a danged one of these. But I'm confidently predicting that "Nowhere In Africa" will win, on the basis that I've just read a review of it that makes it sound real interesting and if I appear to be confident about the choice, I don't have to explain it and thus will be free to move on.
A walkover for Michael Moore, right? It's the one documentary that people have actually seen. Even more miraculously, it's a documentary that people are actually talking about. Surely, this makes "Bowling For Columbine" the prohibitive favorite?
Nuh-uh. A great many things stand between Michael Moore and the Oscar:
1) The voting procedure for Best Documentary is best described as "Freak-Assed." Most Oscar categories follow a two-tiered process. Academy members who should know what they're talking about create the nominations. That is, when Thelma Schoonmaker is nominated for Best Editing, it's the result of her fellow film editors liking what they saw in "Gangs Of New York" and putting her name on the ballot. Then, the whole Academy gets to vote on who wins.
But Best Documentary is a freak. It's tightly controlled by the documentarians, and in the past the process has been described as either Institutional or Downright Corrupt, depending on whether or not the speaker believes that there are lawyers in the audience. At the moment, the judging is controlled by the documentary community. As with other trade organizations, they decide who gets nominated. The voting is then thrown open to the entire membership of the Academy...but you have to prove that you've seen all five films.
I mean, imagine that! People having to prove that they know what they're talking about before they cast their ballot!
Yeah, that makes sense. But the obvious effect of this is that there's the appearance of open balloting when in truth, it's still controlled by documentarians. You have to really try very hard to get to a screening of the nominated films. More than that, you have to be truly dedicated to documentaries to sit through five feature films.
Again, I'm trying hard to see the documentarians' side of this. Many documentaries are indeed very political in nature, so without controls on the voting, it's very possible that Best Documentary could become a meaningless award, more accurately described as Most Popular Cause. Still, all of these controls have an effect. You would tend to assume that documentary filmmakers (and documentary buffs) would go in with specific expectations. Are certain films completely Oscar-Proof, because they deal with subject matter that's immediately unpalatable to that specific slice of the Academy that will be qualified to vote for it?
Hence, Michael Moore's problem. Solely on a schematic level, "Bowling For Columbine" is anti-Gun, anti-George Bush, anti-Big Business. I imagine Michael Moore standing behind one of those plexiglass walls that Wal-Mart uses to protect the high-ticket Playstation games. The holes in it are big enough that he can stick his hands through and pick up an Oscar – hence the nomination – but not big enough to actually pull one out and stick it in his pocket.
2) Sony – distributors of "Winged Migration" – might be messing around with the process. So by now, you know that you can't vote for Best Documentary unless you've seen all of the nominated films. Imagine that you're one of the nominees. Further imagine that you're one of the largest and most powerful entertainment conglomerates in this sector of occupied space. You look at the list of scheduled Academy screenings and see that there's one scheduled in Greenstick Fracture, South Dakota. One of your competitors is a film entitled "Greenstick Fracture: Fulcrum Of Progress, Haven of Opportunity for Light Industrial Investment." You have reason to expect that your film ("Dakota: How America Says 'Just Keep Driving'") will not do well in this venue.
What do you do? Well, you explain that you have a very limited number of prints and won't be able to send the film to Greenstick Fracture. Congratulations: you've just tampered with the voting, and can walk away, swathed in the minty-fresh aroma of Plausible Deniability.
Am I saying that Sony's done this? Nope. But Michael Moore is. An interesting data point. Still, it's hard to take anything that Michael Moore says at face value, because
3) "Bowling For Columbine" isn't a documentary. See my essay on the subject, "Quacking for Columbine."
4) Voters will be scared green at the thought of what Michael Moore would say if he won. There are larger live global audiences to play to, but unless you're either (a) wearing a football uniform or (b) announcing that you will activate a secret network of weather satellites from your underground lair to visit a new ice age unto the planet unless you receive one hundred trillion dollars, the Oscars are as big as you're going to get. Of course, it's utterly bogus to let that sort of thing influence your voting, but I'm not voting here; I'm betting.
All told, I don't like Moore's chances at receiving the Oscar this year. So,
I've only actually seen two of these: "Twin Towers" and the Rosa Parks film. The latter is often spoken of as the front-runner, chiefly by virtue of its subject matter. I wonder if it'll get the votes it needs, however. The trouble with "Mighty Times" is that it was produced as a film that could be shown to schools, to educate kids about Rosa Parks and the bus strike that put the modern civil rights movement on the map. And it shows. I thought the doc was lightweight. Even when it shows the bombings and the lynchings that so dramatically raised the stakes of protesting in that particular place and at that particular time, there's a certain "2 PM on PBS" feel to things. Plus, a significant portion of the documentary consists of recreations, shot using period equipment and film stock. The recreations are made distinct from the archival footage, but I wonder how documentary voters are going to feel about that.
I gotta give it to Twin Towers. It's a 9/11 story with a potent difference: the filmmakers happened to be following a New York City police unit as part of an upcoming reality-tv series when the day came, so this doc features more than the by-now-familiar imagery: it also has interviews and footage of these men shot when the eleventh day of September had no particular importance to anyone not born or married on that day.
In reading Entertainment Weekly's Oscar handicaps, though, I note that Rosa Parks will be attending the Oscars. Hmm. I suppose it'd would be a significant factor, if the voters knew that beforehand. But I'm sticking with "Twin Towers." It's a more grownup film and I think it's far more affecting.
OK: we can eliminate "Spirit" right away (a very fine film that's nonetheless outclassed by its other nominees), as well as "Treasure Planet." It lost an immense amount of money and lots of people made sure everyone knew that Disney lost a lot of money on it. File another one in the "The fact that things like this shouldn't influence voting doesn't mean that it doesn't influence voting" drawer.
(Plus, I mean "Treasure Planet"? I gotta admit that I couldn't get past the basic concept. If you want to make a killer animated version of Treasure Island, why not just make a killer animated version of Treasure Island? And I believe that any movie which seriously suggests that an Extreme Sport can be used as a practical means of transportation (skysurfing, in this case) should automatically have one star knocked off, just because.)
So now we're once again stuck with an impossible decision.
"Lilo and Stitch" is easily Disney's greatest movie since "Beauty And The Beast." It represents part of the New Disney: a return to meat-and-potatoes filmmaking, where it's all about developing characters and selling their performances through remarkably assured animation. It's a sweet story of an orphaned girl adopting a homicidal genetically-engineered alien bioweapon. Imagine what a Pokemon would be like if the cartoon aired after 11 PM on the Cartoon Network. And three cheers to animators unafraid to put delightfully pneumatic beach babes in a "G"-rated film. Remember, daddies need to be entertained, too.
If it were possible to give someone a hundred bucks and receive a Hayao Miyazaki Lifetime Pass, "Spirited Away" would have been my motivator to slap down the dough. It's possible that as Americans, we can enjoy his movies in a way that the Japanese can't. "Spirited Away" involves the adventures of a little girl who (with her parents) stumble on a resort spa for spirits and mystical entities. Mom and Dad over-indulge at the food court and are turned into pigs, but the girl gets away and is forced to take a temp job at the resort while she figures out how to restore her parents and escape.
Along the way, we're introduced to a who's who of Japanese fantasy. I imagine that these creatures are old hat to the Japanese, but it's all delightfully new to us. Imagine that you'd never heard any fairy tales before. There's this woman with dozens and dozens of children, and they all live together in an immense shoe. How about the story of a dustmaid who gets a chance to attend a royal ball? She doesn't have the means, so a fairy changes a pumpkin into a coach and a bunch of mice into footmen, and she dances all night in a pair of slippers made of glass.
It's so familiar to us that the sequence of words barely even registers. When anyone else would be thinking: "Wow, what sort of shoe would it be? I don't suppose it'd be an open-toe sandal. Something like a lumberjack boot; plenty of room for bunk beds and a steel-reinforced toe to hide in during earthquake season."
Kids love "Spirited Away" but for adults, it's a chance to hear fairy takes for the very first time again. It's also just perfectly assembled. The movie doesn't make perfect sense, but I suspect that it was intentionally constructed to proceed the way that dreams do. It's a sequence of events. If your brain's higher functions were online, you'd immediately stop and wonder why animated cinders are delivering blocks of coal to a furnace. As-is, though, you're in a dream state so all you know is that you've got to get those fires stoked because a customer has just come in for a hot bath.
And then there's "Ice Age." Disney actually had a chance to buy this production lock, stock and barrel in 2001. According to an article on Jim Hill's supermegahyperginchy site, when Fox's previous digital adventure ("Titan AE") tanked, they were concerned about their investment and quietly sent the Mouse a work print. It was labelled an ugly embarrassment and sent back.
Biiiig mistake. "Ice Age" sold an immense number of tickets and is a huge hit on DVD. And no wonder: the approach to character design is absolutely new, it's a fun story that keeps moving along without ever ever ever ever making anyone sing, and the rendering is just fantastic. An interesting aspect of digital animation is, of course, that nothing exists unless it's defined by a designer, an animator, or a software engineer. In live-action and traditional filmmaking, there are individual styles but light is light, physics are physics, and paint is paint.
When a computer runs the whole show, the question of a studio's "Signature Style" becomes even more important. Because each studio tends to use its own custom renderers, a quanta of light interacts with air, water, and solid objects one way in a Pixar production and a totally different way in a world rendered by DreamWorks. And Fox's world is a world of subtle, natural lighting and complex shadows.
Personally, I think this one's a race between "Ice Age" and "Lilo And Stitch." As marvellous as "Spirited Away" is, it ends like a dream: with an abruptly and unsatisfying chain of logic.
I've actually seen all of these. First off the list is "Mt. Head," which made me suspect that Mr. Yamamura seriously needs to have his dosage adjusted. Next is "The Cathedral." It's technically impressive, but that's the problem. It looks like a demo of a new procedural renderer. You've just written some code that animates natural-looking growth cycles, so what do you do with it? Well, how about make a short in which a cathedral sprouts up out of nowhere, with tendrils reaching into the sky forming columns and barrel-vaulted ceilings? Cool, let's do that. There's no story. Mentally I kept thumbing the "Select" button of a nonexistant game controller, to terminate the opening animation and start the game.
"Das Rad" won't win but it's interesting nonetheless. It's the stop-motion tale of two stationary piles of rocks. Human civilization comes and goes while our two heroes, moving and thinking at geological speed, try to figure out what we're up to. A cityscape of modern skyscrapers washes up the countryside like an advancing wave, halts just before it crashes over the two piles of rocks, and then quickly decays and crumbles. "Wow, that was close, wasn't it?" one comments, picking at a piece of moss.
In this category, the advice is to never bet against Pixar or Aardman Animations. But this is an unusual year: folks who bought the "Monsters, Inc." DVD recognize "Mike's New Car" as one of the bonus items. So maybe voters won't think of this as a "real" theatrical short, on the virtue that many people have actually had a chance to see it.
I'm gonna pick The Chubbchubbs! but wholly on merit. "Mike's New Car" features a single exterior location, two characters, and one background extra. "Chubbchubbs!" features a densely-populated interior, a sweeping exterior location, and a cast of thousands. It's also your opportunity to see Darth Vader arm wrestle Yoda. On that basis alone, it deserves the Oscar.