Tom O’Neil at Gold Derby talks to several people about the chance of the little robot making it into the big five. Here is what Mark Harris had to say and then we can talk a bit about how the balloting works:
I think a big difference between this year and last year is that at the end of 2007 the number of movies with some sort of passionate following was pretty staggering. There were at least three live-action movies that didn’t get best picture nominations — “Into the Wild,” “Sweeney Todd,” “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” — that I would imagine had a substantial number of No. 1 votes. This year, I don’t sense that depth of support for that many movies. “Wall-E” is one of the few that I hear people discussing with real passion. It’ll be interesting to see if that adds up to votes.
So this is how they do it. Every Academy member who decides to turn in a ballot ranks their choices number 1 to 5. They first count the number of number one votes. I’ll leave the rest to Tom O’Neil in an article he wrote last year, just nevermind Sweeney Todd:
In order to be nominated, a film needs one-sixth of the votes plus one — that’s about 868 out of 5,200 votes. As soon as accountants figure that, say, “Sweeney Todd” reaps that tally, they stop counting and set those ballots aside, decreeing “Sweeney” a best pic nominee. The remaining ballots with “Sweeney” on top get distributed to other stacks based upon their second-ranked choices.
If no other movie has enough number-one votes or those number twos once the stray “Sweeney” ballots are re-distributed, then accountants turn to the movies with the fewest votes and redistribute those ballots based upon number-two votes.
Over and over they repeat the process, working from the smallest stacks to the largest, until a film has the magic 868 votes. Then counting for that film stops, the stack is set aside and the remaining ballots in that stack get re-distributed, too, based on the film with the highest next ranking. Over all, about a dozen rounds of redistribution occur before the five nominees are settled.
It’s easy to see Wall-E or even Dark Knight getting in under those conditions, eh? If all it needs is a minimum is of 868? Slumdog is a lock, but it may be the only one we can figure out at this point, without the DGA or the PGA. The PGA divides their awards, with animation given its own category – that might not help with determining Wall-E’s chances (unless it crosses over, but it probably won’t since there are two separate categories). Is it eligible for the DGA? I would assume so but I haven’t yet received confirmation.
No Response for "Can Wall-E Be Nominated for Best Picture?"
Andrew Stanton would so deserve a DGA and a nomination for Director at the Academy Awards. I think if he does make it at the DGA then it’s fair to assume WALL-E’s getting a Best Pic nom (because, unfortunately, I don’t see the Academy recognizing Stanton’s clear meticulous care for every single frame of the film).
I’m absolutely blown away at how little people take animated films seriously.
People seem to think that since it has it’s own category, it should just win that, even if it’s better than the other movies that year.
“I’m absolutely blown away at how little people take animated films seriously.”
Too true, Dan. As if huge chunks of many Best Picture nominees aren’t, in a sense, “animated” — The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the most prominent example.
The first half of WALL-E is so perfectly photorealistic, it looks more like the actual world than many parts of Australia (the movie, not the country.)
This whole 2 category thing is stupid. It should surprise no one that a film, if great enough, could be nominated for best animated film AND best picture of the year. A ‘best documentary’ nominee should be elligible for ‘best picture.’ If a film truly is one of the best 5 films of the year, then it should have a shot at being in the final 5 at the Oscars. Duh.
The only thing that should create controversy would be if, say, WALL•E won “Best Picture,” but then it didn’t win ‘best animated feature.’ That wouldn’t make sense, now would it? But that kind of crap happens all the time at awards shows where films are elligible in different but related categories.
The only ‘fair’ thing to do would be to have some sort of playoff system, which may actually be better. The 5 ‘best picture’ nominees could come from the winners of 5 sub-categories. The winners of ‘best foreign film,’ ‘best animated film,’ ‘best documentary,’ ‘best drama,’ and ‘best comedy/musical’ would fill up the 5 slots. Will the Oscars ever do it this way? Nope.
“The first half of WALL-E is so perfectly photorealistic, it looks more like the actual world than many parts of Australia (the movie, not the country.)”
Too true. Perfect evidence why “Australia” shouldn’t even be mentioned when cinematograpy/visual effects awards are considered. There were a few too many Frank Millers-esque greenscreen/CGI moments in there for my liking.
“It’s easy to see Wall-E or even Dark Knight getting in under those conditions, eh? If all it needs is a minimum is of 868?”
Also easy to see, in a year with no runaway frontrunners, how any movie can go all the way and win Best Picture — if all it needs is 1/5 of the votes + 1, or roughly 1041 votes.
Every time somebody brings up AMPAS homophobia as a factor in the Crash win, I like to console myself with the fact that only 1041 Academy members had to vote for it. And among them only two confirmed homophobes: Ernestine and Tonya.
Though, admittedly they’re probably not the only ones.
Thanks for posting an explanation Sasha!
Hilariously true statement about Wall-E being vastly more photorealistic than Australia. Hahaha.
I can just see it now if Wall-E is somehow nominated for Best Picture (I sincerely do not see it happening): the jihad Jeff Wells will declare, assiduously determined to “take it down!!”
As I wrote in the previous thread, I think WALL•E has much better odds both in BP and BD than many are giving it credit for. It’s one of the few films showing up across all Critics’ boards and will definitely be many Academy members’ top film.
Based on all this information it seems,
Slumdog is locked in, Button is locked in.
Milk is next to lock.
You would think the Dark Knight can be seen like an indie movie with a strong following, a la Little Miss Sunshine, and so I’d count that in.
And then I suspect Wall-E isn’t as loved by industry insiders as it is by all of us, so that would be the only way I see Nixon getting in, but if I’m wrong and the little robot does have the tech and producer support, than i think it beats Nixon out.
If you haven’t noticed, I really do not want F/N in the BP race lol.
You think Button is more locked in than Milk, Ryan? That is an interesting take on the Oscar race. Thus far, judging by the cumulated “precursors,” Milk is a distant second after Slumdog Millionaire in the Best Picture race. Of course, the critics don’t mean all that much, but they usually do mean something when taken as a whole.
An interesting analogy between The Dark Knight’s following an a devoted indie film’s. At first that did not sound right but in many ways it would represent the “populist” film (what with being the #2 domestic picture of all time and all that).
I do believe Slumdog is locked in. And I concur: I most certainly want Frost/Nixon out of the Best Picture race. Please!
@ Ryan
Interesting comparison of The Dark Knight to Little Miss Sunshine. I never thought of putting them in the same sentence together, but what do I know?
As for Number 5 (Wall-e, sorry, I’m going through Short Circuit withdrawl) I totally think animated films should be taken seriously. So many of the great films of the last 25 to 30 years have been animated. And, in my opinion, if you can manage the feat of making people laugh or cry over a drawing or computer model, you definitely deserve some credo. I don’t know if Wall-e can go the distance, but we’ll see.
Frost/Nixon is a rather benign piece that’s not going to make anyone uneasy (thanks a lot, Ron Howard) and that means it’ll occupy that default nominee spot.
I would be very happy if Frost/Nixon fails to make the cut. I would love to see both DK and Wall-E nominated.
Wishful thinking, I know.
Does that mean that last year Atonement had some passionate followers–maybe Brits–to put it down as number one or two in the nomination process?
What will the Academy members who are British be voting for this year?
“What will the Academy members who are British be voting for this year?”
Slumdog Millionaire and The Dark Knight are packed with UK talent.
Animated films can certainly be as great or better than live-action pictures. However, and I know I’m the minority here, “Wall-E”, like cousins “The Incredible” and “Ratatouille” before it, is greatly overrated. Yes, even in a ‘weak year’ like this.
I think that after hitting all those home runs in a row starting with “Toy Story” up until “Finding Nemo”, Pixar hasn’t been able to produce a movie that reaches those heights of greatness. Ironically, and no pun intended, I have great hopes for “Up” though.
For the record, I did love that little robot. He broke my heart in the first hour of the film. The second hour was also fantastic. Those outer space visuals were great, and I loved the metaphor that the spaceship stood for. So, what killed it for me? The inclusion of Fred Willard as the President of Earth.
It was like screaming “hey, look, we’re so technologically advanced that now we can include live actors in our animated movies!”. Call me nitpicky or whatever the hell you want, but it’s just incongruent for this particular film. He should have been made an animated character like the rest, or they should have made the rest of the (fat-ass) humans live actors as well.
Bottom line: while it does deserve its pretty much locked Best Animated Feature win, it doesn’t deserve a Best Picture nomination. Not over “Revolutionary Road”, “The Dark Knight” or “The Wrestler”, in that order.
“Bottom line: while it does deserve its pretty much locked Best Animated Feature win, it doesn’t deserve a Best Picture nomination. Not over “Revolutionary Road”, “The Dark Knight” or “The Wrestler”, in that order.”
From your mouth to the Academy voters’ ears!
#16
THANK YOU!! Finally, someone who feels the same way about the Incredibles and Ratatouille.
First I have to say that, if enough Academy voters feel WALL-E is good enough to be a best picture nominee, then it should be nominated. However, I’m not sure it is good enough. Granted, parts of the film were brilliant, but I felt it got bogged down in places because of its technical marvels — gadgetry for the sake of gadgetry.
That’s just my opinion.
Willard was there I think to show the stark physical difference of the humans on the axiom.
I think a lot of older folks (not to accuse) grew up with the idea of cartoons as silly fare relegated for Saturday mornings and only for children.
I think no one can doubt the power of animation and that many animated films are more moving than many live action films; Miyazaki films and Pixar of course being the two biggest forces in this movement.
Even old school Disney is pretty amazing if you go back and look at ‘em.
I agree with #16, although I think Ratatouille is a much superior film to Wall-E.
I am with you 100% on the fact that it’s ridiculous that some people think a good animated movie should get a Best Picture nomination. Key word there is GOOD, not GREAT. Besides, despite animated films having their own category, Beauty and the Beast was already nominated in 1991. Why not give the nomination to The Dark Knight? There’s never been a superhero movie nominated before, and it’s a better film over all. If Wall-E took TDK’s spot in the top 5, I’d be really questioning the quality of films that came out this year.
Last I checked, Wall-E wasn’t the second highest grossing film of the year, and the biggest blockbuster since Titanic. I can almost guarantee that nominating TDK would get more ratings than Wall-E would if nominated for Best Picture.
I’ve sorted it out on my site, with some percentages on how safe a bet the big two races are, and the rest of the big 5.
Anyone know if Vegas is taking odds on nominations? In a 2 weeks or so we could all make a little bit of money lol. That is until Iron Man gets nominated for Best Picture lol.
Thats a given and no surprise at all. Obviously TDK will get more ratings. But box-office is a sorry criteria for judging quality of films.
If Wall-E were as good as a Miyazaki film, I’d love to see it nominated. Unfortunately, it’s only great in its first half. I really despised all the fat-bashing in the Axiom segments. Yeah, send some chubby 10-year-old home from the movies to slit her wrists. By contrast, Kung Fu Panda, while not nearly as creative, had a much more tolerant and positive message about body image.
Think of the outrage here at AD if the human race had been brought to the verge of extinction by everybody turning gay and not having kids anymore. Not a believable scenario, you say? Yet Stanton’s notion that human beings would lose all initiative (just because they got fat) and turn into mindless slushy-sponges instead of either cleaning up the Earth or exploring space to find another habitable planet – yeah, that’s just so real. But I guess it’s always cool to pick on the lazy, trashy fatties.
That said, Wall-E and Eve rock.
” Think of the outrage here at AD if the human race had been brought to the verge of extinction by everybody turning gay and not having kids anymore. ”
Its not like gay people don’t have genitals. They can still have kids. How will the human race become extinct if all people turn gay?
Uh, the humans didn’t lose all initiative when they finally saw what was going on beyond their floating recliners and computer screens. If anything, it’s pretty pro-human seeing how quickly they got their shit together.
red_wine: Exactly my point. How is the Earth destroyed and nobody bothers to fix it, just cause everyone happens to be fat? It’s not like they had to lose all initiative and ability to move. Why should they? It’s a screenwriter’s stupid conceit, based on prejudice. Gay people could run the world and propagate just fine in real life. So could fat people. Only in Stanton’s universe is obesity directly linked to the end of the world.
ladylurks, I’m going to take the middle road and not make a fat remark about you, but not high enough to not mention the fact that I didn’t make one.
You seem to have missed the whole point of the metaphor. The Earth didn’t get to the point where we first find Wall-E because “human beings lost all initiative (just because they got fat) and turned into mindless slushy-sponges”. It’s exactly the other way around.
@ladylurks: Wow, I really can’t follow your reasoning. Just how does Stanton link obesity to the end of the world? He just sends humans on a cruise ship during the clean-up, and due to the imperfect gravity simulation and sitting on hoverchairs people have bone loss and gain weight, which is quite a logical consequence. Stanton and co actually researched that thing about bone loss. After being on the same ship and doing the same things for generations, it’s normal for them to be unmotivated. Hell, I would be.
Johan: Yet you’d think they could establish a colony on Mars or the Moon, or find a habitable planet outside our solar system, with all that time on their hands. Or they could invent a way not to lose bone mass or to perfect the gravity simulation. Or they might get bored with eating the same reconstituted food and become thin and apathetic. Lots of possibilities. Odd that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and it’s all connected to trash and fat people.
But perhaps that’s the way Hollywood screenwriters think. You can never be too rich or too thin.
Ladylurks, just for giggles, did you feel that Idiocracy was a harmful film because it might have hurt morons’ feelings?
Zwingli: I didn’t see Idiocracy, not being inclined to laugh at stupidity.
Ladylurks, you have so missed the point.
In Idiocracy, society collapses because it devalues intelligence and celebrates ignorance.
In Wall-E, society collapses because it values convenience, inactivity, and disposable consumerism.
Ah, then Idiocracy must be the futurisitc Forrest Gump.
As for Wall-E, I really don’t see why a penchant for convenience or inactivity should bring about the collapse of society. Excessive activity (as in war, zealotry, bigotry, hatred) is much more frightening to me. In fact, disposable consumerism appears to be the only legitimate villain here.
@ladylurks: in a way, that kind of what Stanton meant, that without a clear initiative, people’s lives might actually evolve into what he proposed (of course not exactly like that, it’s supposed to be a little comedic too). That’s what WALL-E causes, he instills inspiration and initiative in all those around him, for example in the well-meaning, but unmotivated captain. In the end, and that’s also why the ending is what it is, he gives a positive message, one of hope and, well, change.
That’s an interesting point about there not being that much passion for different movies outside of Slumdog. I am almost ready to say that both Wall-E and The Dark Knight get nominated. I have seen (and know a lot of people who have seen) Benjamin Button and while we all agree it’s good, I haven’t talked to a single person who thinks it’s one of the 5 Best of the year. I personally loved Frost/Nixon and think it should be there but really do enough people like it that much? I’ll be interested to see if the passion for Milk goes outside of The Gay Community and Critics. I for one (as a Straight Male in case anyone wonders) also think it’s one of the 5 Best of the year. So as of right now my BP Predix are:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (too much technical support)
The Dark Knight (ditto Techies + massive BO)
Milk (I actually think it gets in as your prerequisite biopic ala Capote)
Slumdog Millionaire (probably your winner)
Wall-E
If the Academy is afraid of nominating 2 Blockbusters then F/N will get in. Doubt won’t get in without strong BO and Revolutionary Road is dead.
Johan: I agree that Wall-E inspires the captain and that the message is hopeful at the end. It just takes a rather unnecessary and unkind route getting there.
Still, it’s a good movie, despite that major flaw. I regard it much as I do Breakfast at Tiffany’s, delightful if you can get past the Mickey Rooney Asian caricature. Audiences back then didn’t think that was offensive either, but time has brought new insight.
Oh dear xenu, I really was hoping to never be again reminded of Tom O’Neill and the SweeneyTodd debacle of last year. He saw 15 minutes of it and proclaimed it WOULD win BP. And this was less than a year after he almost ‘drew a warm bath’ over the Dgirlz snub. Oh, the humanity!
Change indeed: presumably the children will now have mandatory phys ed classes and the captain, his own treadmill!
Look, to simplify the discussion here, everything from the fall of humanity in space to its recuperation on earth is figured in terms of the body. Say what you will about the film’s critique of “disposable consumerism,” or “inactivity,” or whatever — it’s all conveyed through an image of a fat body on a hover chair, unable to stand on his own legs.
To say that Stanton “doesn’t link” obesity to the end of the world seems like a pretty conspicuous misreading of a film whose climax sees fat man #1 learning to work again — to surmount the inactivity and consumerism we’ve all noted — by standing and walking, i.e. burning calories, overcoming his disability.
So the argument as I see it is not over whether the film is prejudiced against fat bodies but how that prejudice informs the narrative, and whether or not you can live with it. If you can, fine: nobody here has thrown a stone at you personally. And if you don’t want to talk about what Wall-E has to say about fat bodies getting off their asses, why are you still arguing over a movie that couldn’t exist without that metaphor, anyway? It would be like talking about The Dark Knight without mentioning the Joker.
To get back on topic, of course Wall-E can be nominated: for the first time in a long time, there are at least 4 major contenders who seem to inspire “meh” reactions among half of the people who see them. Wall-E probably has about as much support as Little Miss Sunshine did, by contrast.
For most of the “human” part of Wall-E, I was slightly turned off by the idea that everyone is so obese they just hover along and let Earth go to hell. By the time they got to that whole, “Oh, you’ve lost all your muscle and bone mass, so you can’t really walk!” part, the explanation fell flat and felt like a line they hashed out five minutes beforehand so as not to offend anyone. Even if they “researched” it, it still felt that way, to me.
I’m still on the fence about whether I think Wall-E deserves the BP nomination. On one hand, I think it is definitely the best thing to come from Pixar so far. On the other, there have been other animated films in recent years that I liked even more (Spirited Away, The Triplets of Belleville, Persepolis). If these didn’t deserve a nomination, I’m not sure Wall-E deserves it either. Then again, all three of those films also had the foreign language category to contend with and only one of them actually won the best animated oscar (Spirited Away).
But what do I know, most people like Wall-E better than these films and maybe I will too after some time has passed. Right now, it probably won’t be in my top 5 for the year after I’ve seen all the films I have yet to see but it will definitely be in my top 10. So if the Academy does decide to nominate it, I’m all for that. It does seem more like a #1 pick to me while a film like F/N is more like a #3-5.
Right now, here’s how I think it will go:
Slumdog (lock for a nom, could easily be the winner)
Milk (probably a lock for a nom, possibly a winner)
Ben Button (same as Milk)
TDK
Wall-E or Doubt or Frost/Nixon (I’d say all 3 of these have about an equal chance of making it, Wall-E and Doubt maybe a little more than F/N)
I guess The Wrestler, The Reader and Rachel Getting married still have oustide chances but I doubt they’ll get in. Rev. Road is most likely done (though it could pull an Atonement) and I don’t think Defiance has a snowball’s chance in hell at this point.
And thanks for reminding me that my beloved Sweeney Todd didn’t make it last year…
I have seen (and know a lot of people who have seen) Benjamin Button and while we all agree it’s good, I haven’t talked to a single person who thinks it’s one of the 5 Best of the year.
Then you haven’t read any of my (or Sasha’s) many posts on the subject here at AD. ::sniff::
Benjamin Button is my favorite film of 2008, tied for first place with The Dark Knight, Milk and WALL-E. Each of these four films touched me in ways that the other three couldn’t. But if I had to pick one as “the best,” it would be Benjamin Button.
I guess I can see why people may missinterpret the film as “fat-bashing”, but it’s just not true.
“‘Wall-E’ for dummies”: the planet wasn’t destroyed because people were so fat and lazy that they didn’t bother to do a thing. It all went to hell simply because nobody, either thin or fat, gave a damn. And after years and years of living in a spacecraft where they don’t even have to walk by themselves, they got (very) fat and lazy.
God… Does everything really needs to be spelled out like that?
Why is everyone proclaiming “Revolutionary Road” dead already? The damn thing hasn’t even opened yet! I still have hope that it’ll come roaring back into the race with good box office and the help of the guilds’ awards…
Not to mention that it IS a better film that many (most, actually) Oscar hopefuls.
I’m very perplexed by this whole “fatness” discussion. I never thought that the humans were obese per se. I thought they had become BIG, SOFT blobs with extreme bone and muscle deterioration. I guess they could have been depicted as SKINNY, SOFT blobs too. But that might have conjured up another association that the filmmakers didn’t want to have in their (bottom-line) Disney-Pixar cartoon.
The fact that so many people need the film spoon fed to them show how clever it really is.
Oh please. Just because YOU thought it was so clever doesn’t mean it IS. Different people see things differently. That’s the beauty of movies, NOT EVERYONE HAS TO LOVE SOMETHING OR THINK IT’S AMAZING/GENIUS/THE BEST THING EVER. To belittle someone’s opinion is to belittle your own.
To reduce our relationship to Earth to some sentiment is not “pro-human” – it is condescending, middle-class self-righteousness, like Earth Day (drive home and turn off those lights!!!). Hence, of course, the popularity of Wall-E among the movie going public. It says, the three Rs will save us, if we just practise, not unlike yoga!
My criticism holds. The future is brilliant, egalitarian, and 99.9% white, a middle-class utopia, in Wall-E, except for some rudimentary sentimental longing for foliage. It’s nauseating. And remember, there are NO CARS in those piles of garbage, otherwise, the middle class might have taken the movie too personally.
Herzog must have loathed this film.
You shittin me, other dan?
There was a scene where wall-e pressed the clicker to a car lock and looked around for where the sound was coming from.
While I guess it’s not indicating very much about cars, it’s not like they were avoiding it.
Also, Eve looked for a plant in a truck (the pizza planet truck, actually).
The best picture nominees are
Biopic
American Movie
Indie
Epic
Movie that no one thinks should be there
Critics Darling
I think almost every year 5 out of those 6 categories are filled
The last 3 years:
2007
No Country for Old Men – American Movie/Critics Darling
Atonement – Epic
Juno – Indie
Michael Clayton – Movie that no one thinks should be there
There Will Be Blood – A VERY loose biopic, but fits the mold
2006
The Departed – Doesn’t really fit “Movie about America” but its not that far off.
Babel – Movie that no one thinks should be there
Letters from Iwo Jima – Epic
Little Miss Sunshine – Indie
The Queen – Biopic
2005
Crash – Movie that no one thinks should be there
Brokeback Mountain – Critics Darling
Capote – Biopic
Good Night, and Good Luck – Indie
Munich – Movie that no one thinks should be there (I did)
So this year:
Slumdog Millionaire – Indie/Critics Darling
Milk – Biopic
The Dark Knight and Ben Button – Epic/American Movie
Frost Nixon – Movie that no one thinks should be there
Sounds about right.
Hey 50 Dan, is that you Angelucci?
Actually, Ryan H, I think it’s some combination of
Biopic (Milk, Frost/Nixon)
Masterpiece (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, WALL-E, The Dark Knight)
British (Slumdog Millionaire)
Big Lit Adaptation (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Revolutionary Road)
Big Box Office (WALL-E, The Dark Knight)
Epic (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire)
Indie (The Wrestler, Rachel Getting Married, Slumdog Millionaire)
The ones covering the most bases (locks?) are Button and Slumdog at this point, followed by TDK and WALL-E.
(I just can’t hang with the Movie No One Thinks Should Be There.)
Haifa–I was being somewhat facetious in the light of Dan, who seems to have a massive superiority complex.
And Dan — there ARE cars in the earth’s wreckage. Even the Pizza Planet truck from Toy Story is in there. And the movie is way more interested in the corporation’s fuck-ups than the garbage–it’s more of a byproduct than anything else. How else could they empty Earth of humans that would make it relevant to the rest of everything else? For someone who seems to have a lot of intellectual arrogance (nice name-dropping of Herzog), I don’t know how that was lost on you.
From #21 above:
“I think a lot of older folks (not to accuse) grew up with the idea of cartoons as silly fare relegated for Saturday mornings and only for children.”
Ok, so how do you explain Mary Poppins from way back when? It was partially animated AND it was tres tres a lot a kid’s movie…
Anyways, in *my* perfect world, the flop would look like this:
The Dark Knight
Doubt
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire
Wall*E (for personal reasons, my ideal winner)
I would not mind it if any of these pictures win. My number 2 is The Dark Knight, followed by Slumdog Millionaire.
I think it will look more like this:
Curious…Benjamin (ugh… so overrated)
The Dark Knight (amazing, and my first pic for this bunch)
Doubt*
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire**
*I think the love for Meryl, PSH, Amy Adams, and the critics darling Viola far outweigh the folks from Frost/Nixon, so I put them in this slot.
**Oddly enough, even though incredibly deserving for the nod AND win, I think Slumdog has the greatest potential for being left out of the BP race. I see it kinda like United93… a critics darling that doesn’t translate into mainstream support within the Academy. Instead, I wouldn’t be surprised if The Clint’s Changeling made it in along with Angie and the rest of the Los Angeles-themed folk in tow, therefore filling creating the “shouldn’t be here” slot.
49Dan, who are you? Some sort of pseudo-intellectual version of Sarah Palin?
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a gazillion times better than “Doubt”. It’s even superior to “The Dark Knight”.
Wanna talk overrated? Look no further than “Wall-E”.
Carlos – did you miss the leftist part?
Et al – and the Wall-E future also had clean cars, so you could drive them everywhere and never worry about pollution.
LOL – I’ll do the same thing I did with TDK, when I said it was all about justifying the excesses of the so-called “war on terror”, and I got the response “all justice is tainted” (that is, I got a reiteration of my own thesis) – so tell me, what is the theme of Wall-E?
Exactly, the movie is in fact a little left-leaning. Your picking it apart so violently suggests a strong right-wing inclination. Am I right?
Carlos – NDP, shop steward, socialist. Wall-E is a reactionary, white, middle class utopia. That the world is a garbage dump is incidental to the thesis it presents. We are on our way to utopia, and only a sentimental affection for foliage, in Wall-E, brings us back to Earth.
Socialist, I’m a socialist.
“Wall-E is a reactionary, white, middle class utopia.”
Utopia? Are you sure you know the correct meaning of that term? I’ll assume you do, and go directly to explaining why you’re wrong.
Everyone is disgustingly fat and so self-absorbed that they don’t even notice each other for the most part. Call me crazy, but that sounds more like a dystopia to me.
“The future is brilliant, egalitarian, and 99.9% white, a middle-class utopia…”
I’ll give you egalitarian (incidentally, isn’t that one of the main goals of socialism?), but brilliant? You must have seen another film.
And just for the record, I’m one of those who think “Wall-E” is overrated and doesn’t deserve a Best Picture Oscar nomination.
Why am I not shocked about Dan’s political leanings? He has the same smugness and obsession with the BOURGEOIS, not to mention the compulsion he has to twist the politics in art (if any) as he sees fit. The Dark Knight is Rumsfeldian, while Batman is shown as using Dent (the figure of tragedy) for his own needs as much as The Joker? Not to mention the guy that opposed the surveillance isn’t mocked or portrayed as ignoble, but actually quite the opposite. especially in the whole of the film. And the fact that the whole system is destroyed after the Joker is caught. Like Rumsfeld wouldn’t want a system like that perpetually in place.
As for foliage, I don’t follow. And UTOPIA? Did you actually watch the film?
Cut and pasted from part of one of my blog entries:
Pixar’s love stories used to be convincing – when they were between two males, e.g. Woody and Buzz, Mike and Sully. Pixar hasn’t really had a convincing love story of young breeders, even as a subplot. They don’t quite know what to do with hormones, partly because the females are inevitably under-written. The romance was the one off-flavor element of Ratatouille, and seeing the vivacious girl get with the reformed jock did nothing for Cars. Now that Wall-E has put the star-crossed lovers at center stage, it starts being weird because they’re ostensibly children. Or are they the familiar working schlub/perfect over-achiever duo that we’ve seen in about 100 movies of the last 10 years? Or are they Jack and Rose – since Titanic, have any two film leads shouted each other’s names quite as often and insistently as Wall-E and Eve? (Give the filmmakers credit for acknowledging Titanic in a big deckchairvalanche.) Whoever these robots are, their love is never quite unforced, and their big moment – floating on the outside of the ship – is oddly truncated. Has it finally come time for Pixar to hand over lead duties to a female character?
Wall-E’s other major concern is the absence of a strong villain. Pixar antagonists haven’t typically commanded much screen time (Kevin Spacey’s Hopper in A Bug’s Life is the exception) – and we never needed more of them. Whether they were the neighbor kid in Toy Story, the dentist in Finding Nemo, the food critic in Ratatouille, or Syndrome (ah, Syndrome), we got just enough of them early to make for juicy payoffs late – we understood their menace even while it lingered offscreen most of the film. Wall-E got the amount of screen time right, but nothing else. The character eventually named Auto (swipe at Cars? homage to Airplane!?) is confused and confusing. He doesn’t get a good entrance, so we’re not really sure about his malevolence for a while. If he controls the ship, shouldn’t he be able to handle a couple of rogue robots, particularly after they’ve fallen overboard? Isn’t the Axiom (the spaceship) sorta like how Homer Simpson described beer – the cause of, and solution to, all life’s problems? Finally, isn’t Auto right? How does a lone plant prove that Earth is ready to support human life? Yet all of this could have been fixed, just by defining him earlier and better, as the other films did with their bad guys. When Eve first landed, we might have seen the HAL-like red light in the window of the drone ship, accompanied by some ominous music. When Wall-E first arrived on the Axiom, the film might have gone to the red light as it did something sinister – yet over-protective, perhaps – with the captain. None of this would have altered the film’s beautiful sense of awe and wonder.
Supporting, two-scene characters in other Pixar films have been as perfectly calibrated as a French appetizer – the nonpareil examples being Bruce and Crush in Finding Nemo, and Edna E. Mode in The Incredibles. But Wall-E muffs this; just from how the extra robots are staged at the climax, you can tell that they’re supposed to feel like the extra toys in Toy Story or the extra cars in Cars, but we never knew them even close to that well. This was attempted half-heartedly, as when one random robot reveals hidden reservoirs of strength in a corridor skirmish. Equally half-hearted is the relationship between the bloated humans John and Mary – there’s a wisp of a suggestion that Wall-E and Eve have shown humans how to love and changed humanity forever (“I didn’t know we had a pool”) – but this should have either been far more explicit or utterly cut.
Wall-E – and, for that matter, I Am Legend – are unimaginable without the prodigious box office success of that other dialogue-impaired, man-alone film called Cast Away. Eight years on, it’s funny how well Cast Away has aged. Before Survivor ever aired, Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis realized that a modern Robinson Crusoe story could be made to work (the space between the two words in the title isn’t insignificant), and they came up with the most successful drama of the 2000’s. On the DVD commentary of Lost, ABC producer Lloyd Braun says that the show originated in his head as Cast Away – the TV show, but it’s almost like the producers of I Am Legend and Wall-E said hey Braun, that’s not Cast Away, we’ll show you Cast Away. But Cast Away, whatever its problems, had the courage to follow through on its thematic desolation – Chuck (Hanks) does lose her in the end, and though there is always at least a speck of hope (in anyone’s life), by the end Chuck is still cast away. I Am Legend and Wall-E – neither of which will be found in the drama section of any video store – don’t dare end that way, and they do feel like less for it.
My biggest question after watching Wall-E is: can Disney values really be combined with the term coined by John Stuart Mill to mean the opposite of utopia – dystopia? I know they’ve succeeded with Autopia and Dinotopia, but Dysneytopia may be verging on dysfunction. I wouldn’t expect film critics to know this, because they’d have to know Disneyland well, but Wall-E doesn’t resemble the Short Circuit character as much as he does RX-24, the Pee-Wee Herman-voiced host of Star Tours. One can only assume that kids who visit the Magic Kingdom now think that RX-24 is Wall-E, and that may actually be a relief to parents: here’s the kids’ shiny new Wall-E toy now associated with the safe, optimistic, cheerful, high-note-scored future that was presumed in just about every space vision offered to children before Wall-E. It’s one thing to present colonial violence in Pocahontas – we’re in an era beyond that (right?) – but to show children that the future is full of melancholy and despair is quite a mixed enchilada to serve. Where can’t they set a story now? Modern Darfur?
Let’s not get it twisted: for adults, the daring and chilling vision of the future is one of many great things about Wall-E. Wall-E’s initial encounters with Eve are tender and lyrical. The movie abounds with clever, sweeping visions, from the roach’s movements to the trash piles that get confused with skyscrapers to the sedentary 28th-century humans (I like that the film slightly backs off its condemnation of its audience by blaming anti-gravity) to Fred Willard’s bits (if any current actor is in the old Disney Fred MacMurray mold, it’s him). I personally loved the vague plant-womb implications of Eve, with the concurrent implications that Wall-E’s womb is only good for compressing trash (although I don’t know what I’d say to a kid who asked me why Eve didn’t just take the cockroach, which she met ten scenes before she saw the plant). Any Pixar film, in terms of richness of detail, character development, and attention to theme, is still leagues ahead of solid celebrity-based cartoons like, say, Over the Hedge or Madagascar or Happy Feet. The good news is that these are still the Pixar salad days. But this time, a few key ingredients went missing.
The utopia is implicit, not explicit. It is the backdrop. There is no poverty, no war, no nothing. Our future is a Hollywood gated community of wealth. Against this backdrop, what is the compulsion to return to Earth? Where does it come from?
I want to discuss the film and what I saw in it. Do any of you?
The utopia is implicit, not explicit.
LOL, give me a break!
64Dan – Maybe I’ve seen too many episodes of Battlestar Galactica, but for me I can take it as a given that people wandering through space would prefer to put their feet on terra firma. If anything the film offers a sort of scathing rebuke to Gene Roddenberry’s ideas that Earthlings can be trusted to be good, creative, honest, democracy-loving people in the coming centuries – instead we’ve become conformist consumerist blobs. I know, I know, Gene had more non-whites. Let me ask you did you have the same issues with the books 1984 and Brave New World? Like, hey, what’s the incentive for anyone to listen to this lone crazy guy who wants to take away our perfect totalitarian society? I mean, granted, Wall-E “short-circuits” (God, I crack myself up) the Orwellian story, but it’s still there and still reasonable…maybe these blobs suffer from a lot of diseases and they keep hearing that someday they’ll find a planet that would ameliorate such problems…I guess I’m putting words in the film’s mouth, but I kinda took that as written, even if I thought the film’s bad guy was very problematically under-written.
It wasn’t portrayed as a utopia, though. The Axiom was shown as a soulless technological overload where computers had indeed implicitly taken over by strangle-holding humans who were distracted and physically warped. Except, and here’s the real kicker, humans (the CEOs) entrusted the Auto to keep that status quo perpetual.
Anyone here young enough to remember The Giver from middle school? Not unlike Wall-E, but unlike a lot of dystopian work, it had people unfamiliar with poverty or suffering or war, but also unaware of their surroundings or at least what was going on. It took simple pleasures rooted in aesthetics to shake humans awake from either being distracted or totally shielded from certain things that would upset that status quo.
Plus, the Axiom ship in question was set to land somewhere in the upper midwest, so I assume most people were white for a reason. Little details…
I think the point of Wall-E is simple:
Quit being Fucktards by letting Technology live your life… Go out and try to find something worth living for and become a member of a society that thinks, not just runs on auto-pilot.
Hmmm… some of it’s major themes…
Love
Friendship
Community
The Green movement (obviously)
Education
ANTI Big Business
ANTI Technology (you could argue… at least I see it this way)
ANTI Living in a box or bubble
I think the brilliance behind this film is the story through which the director, writers, etc make their point; they use a robot to tell a VERY human story. Everything in the movie is backwards from reality, but is it? This is their point, I think.
Yeah, it’s kind of a new-age hippy thing… at least in MHO.
I loved this movie because I was a student who was so obsessed with staying in school and getting all the meticulous little ducks in a row (which admittedly, IS important). Then after seeing Wall-E, I realized that I was tired of being stuck on auto-pilot and being a bum on society. So I just got out there and found a job and started caring about my family, my friends, my community…in other words, MY LIFE. This movie literally changed my life. And that, kind folks, is what it’s about… moving someone. That’s why they’re called “movies” I think! LOL…
Kelly: Wow. Nice.
This has been my thought for sometime, knowing how the ‘favorite’ films prosper. Hence I think COLD MOUNTAIN and DREAMGIRLS lost out a few years ago as most voters seemed to find them ‘good’ films, but not their ‘favorite.’
I think especially at risk is FROST/NIXON. Will it be that many voters, ‘favorite film?’
Kelly, that’s great! But they’re called movies because they’re “moving pictures” as opposed to still pictures: photographs, LOL.
Yes, I know what a movie is HA! and why it’s called that HA HA… i was just trying to make a joke and tie it all together at the end…
Kinda like my very lame Christmas joke…
Did you know Santa’s having an affair? Yeah, he’s been sleeping around with Sussexy Carol!
ba dump ching
Kelly – that is all fine and dandy, but how did humanity get away from their garbage heap? With technology, supplied by those bigass companies. What is the only way to survive in space? In a damn bubble. It’s great you were inspired, but school is always a little isolated, and you had to get out at some point anyway. There was love on the Axiom, people were still married, there was community, not necessarily some naive idealistic community, but a real community, even if it was different from what we ostensibly praise about community here. And what is this “green movement”? I mean, what do you mean by it, and what does Wall-E mean by it? The three Rs? Does it tackle cars and car ownership, and oil and it’s peculiar, particular position in the global economy? The producers have stated they didn’t want the movie to be too realistic, they didn’t want to alienate anyone. They stated that, literally.
(I’ll take Fassbinder, Jarman, even Schlesinger, over Ang Lee and his hyperbolic histrionics anyday.)
While the right wing fanatics may have attacked the movie as environmentalist, I am coming from an utterly different perspective. I think the movie is, as BBM was for a generation who consider themselves more enlighted about gay rights than anyone portrayed in the film and anyone before them, a big, fat pat on their own backs for being part of Earth Day, and for going that extra super length to recycle their recyclables, just as BBM said, yay, you aren’t like those people back then. It seems to pander rather than challenge. It doesn’t say, get the fuck out of your cars, and you don’t need a huge ass house for 3 people, while there are so many on the street. It says, yay, you are making a difference. You are recycling. Bravo.
Dan,
WTF???
Perhaps you have a problem with differing opinions? My advice: get laid.
Yours,
Kelly
…well, saying “get laid” surely doesn’t do justice to what he typed out.
Dan’s problem is that he can’t move on from the environmental aspect.
Danno – What Fassbinder or Jarman or Schlesinger film comes anywhere close to “tackling cars and car ownership, and oil and it’s peculiar, particular position in the global economy”?
I thought that for a cartoon, it was a little dark to tell children that everything is going to hell and we’ll be abandoning this planet for a white-blob Axiom – for you, however, it wasn’t dark enough. What demographic do you envision for Pixar’s next film, goths that consider Trent Reznor a big sell-out?
I have all sorts of objections to the film, spelled out in excruciating detail in #63 up there. But YOU might start by admitting that there is something subversive about blaming Wal-Mart for destroying the world, and then selling walls’ worth of Wall-E dvd’s at Wal-Marts. Hidden rule of life: you can get more people to engage with you if you agree with some little thing they say.
Yo Hoffman I see you. I see you boat.
And as to all the other stuff, about the theme of Wall-e, if you read anything Andrew Stanton has to say about the movie, the main theme is overcoming your irrational programming. Almost every single thing in that movie is reflective of this theme. Wall-E and EVE’s love story, the love story between the two humans, and the captain deciding to go to earth. Wall-E goes to the Axiom because he decides to break with his conventional programming and follow EVE, and along the way, all these robotic things (human and robot alike), learn to become human as the result of a robot.
And to other, pretentious Dan, I don’t know what quote you’re talking about where the producers (and if I may nerd out at you for a second, there was only one producer on Wall-E, Jim Morris) said that they didn’t want to be too realistic as to alienate people, what they PROBABLY meant was that they didn’t want the images to look too realistic because it freaks people out.
If they were worried about alienating people by making the characters too relatable, they wouldn’t have changed the beings on the axiom from green blobs into humans, and repeatedly said on the DVD that they felt the fact that humans work better than green blobs is because you want the audience to see themselves in those characters.
Also:
“(I’ll take Fassbinder, Jarman, even Schlesinger, over Ang Lee and his hyperbolic histrionics anyday.)”
What a pretentious sentence, man.
I do think the #1 votes will help this film get in (though it is hardly a lock). If it comes down to Wall-E Vs. Dark Knight for the 5th slot, there are a lot more critics who have put Wall-E #1 on their best of lists and it has won three significant critics groups (LA, Boston, Chicago) all of which had the option to just give it animated feature, so it seems like the passionate support is there more for Wall-E though granted the academy does not always feel the same as critics.
With Wall-E, given the nature of animated films’ reception, I think a lot of people will place it #1, while many other voters won’t even list it in their top 5, so it’s a real toss-up.
But Frost/Nixon at risk? Michael Clayton (which I personally really enjoyed, rather than simply admired) got in, while The Diving Bell was supposed to have more ardent supporters who would have voted it #1. So thinking simply about the films that will have the most #1s doesn’t seem to cut it, imho.
‘WALL-E’ was an incredible film that I hope gets nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Honestly its the most progressive film in the short list of hot contenders…both in style and substance.
Though very emotional, it had ocean deep themes of earth’s sustainability and consumption but I never viewed it as propaganda. I never consider myself an elitist because I recycle, don’t own a car, and my electricity is generated via mountain wind. Its the choices I make that doesn’t make me better then anyone. More importantly the issues it addresses, WALL*E has a big heart.
So far my top five (alphabetically) for 2008
-’Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons’
-’The Dark Knight’
-’Frost/Nixon’
-’Slumdog Millionaire’
-’WALL*E’
The so-called pretentious sentence, in parentheses, refferred to the following paragraph, not the preceding one. I meant, almost all Fassbinder films included gay love, even sex, and Jarman’s, and even Midnight Cowboy, long before Ang Lee’s over-hyped film. I don’t think the sentence is pretentious. I honestly think, and feel that way. I loathed CTHD, and feel it set martial arts movies back 2 decades. I hated Ang Lee’s swipe at Austen, it was glib and mean-spirited, and I hated BBM for the same reason I hate Wall-E – it is, at core, a self-congratulatory exercise.
I hated Ang Lee’s swipe at Austen, it was glib and mean-spirited
WHAT.
My Lord, where does this rabbit hole end?!
I just thought I’d point out that there’s no such thing as “deserving” a nomination. Just because WALL-E, for instance, wasn’t as good as The Incredibles or Toy Story or whatever, and they never got nominated for Best Picture, doesn’t mean WALL-E “doesn’t deserve” to be nominated this year.
We’re talking about the FIVE BEST PICTURES of 2008. It has absolutely nothing to do with relative quality in terms of the history of film.
WALL-E might be a merely GOOD film in your opinion, but it only “doesn’t deserve” to be nominated IF YOU CAN FIND FIVE BETTER FILMS DURING 2008.
I like animated having its own category. I would hate to see WALL-E as a Best Picture contender. I found it highly overrated. Last year’s Ratatouille was much better, but I wouldn’t have wanted that to be nominated for Best Picture either. Though if WALL-E does make it at least it probably wouldn’t win because people would likely just vote for it in “Best Animated” and want to honor something else in the Best Picture category to spread the love.
I’d be tempted to view all the critics awards, and the possibility of a BP nomination those awards bring, as more of a ‘body of work’ nod for Pixar than for WallE specifically (although as mentioned above, it definitely has one of the more passionate followings of any of this year’s BP potentials)
No matter which way you cut it, Pixar has had an incredible run over the past couple of years, and whether you rate WallE over The Incredibles or Ratatouille or the other way round, we’ve rarely had such an embarrassment of riches from one creative force. I think that the sustained momentum that has been built up over their last few releases will ultimately count a long way to at least a few nominations in the big categories – ie Picture/Director and Original Screenplay (along with a slew of tech/artistic noms).
Personally, I loved the film (as you might have been able to tell). Whilst it wasn’t as consistenly great as Ratatouille, the early earthbound sequences were pretty much some of the best scenes I’ve seen this decade. No hyperbole!
Hmm
Now that this nomination process is laid out, I guess Doubt will be one of the nominees.
Why?
If your Academy member has to actually WRITE down the titles of the films, I am guessing that, in a year like this, where nothing is written in stone, they will take the easy way out and go with the smaller titles.
I know it sounds absurd, and The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King is a recent example of an Oscar nominee (and winner) with an extra long title, but still, that year was pretty much locked
T.
Well, I guess the mystery of “Crash” winning has been solved! LOL!!!
Dan, oh Dan. You try so hard that we can see the wires. You so desperately want to break out of the mold that you end up fitting an archetype yourself: the intense, pseudo-intellectual yuppie who always questions everything and swims against the current for the sole sake of it.
Trust me, you’re not fooling anyone. Except maybe yourself, of course.
Yuppie? Did I mention I work at the front desk of a community centre? A lowly city clerk is a yuppie? Darling, I’m 48 years old, I’ve been watching movies, all sorts of movies, since I was old enough to go to a theatre – at festivals, at reps, at the big chains. I’m sorry if the perspective of someone who’s movie-going experience is broader and longer than a few years alienates you, but the truth is, neither Wall-E nor The Dark Knight strike me as anything but huge, banal commericial successes, and quite cynical to boot – in a long line of recent, over-hyped movies, many based on comic books, like that moralistic crap Sin City, or the “fight the symbol” sillliness of V for Vendetta, and so on.
I neither need, nor want, anything even remotely like the “hero” Batman, never did. And to be honest, the enemies in the real world talk more like him than the Joker. And with Wall-E, this so-called treatise on not relying on machines relies utterly on machines. If you guys can’t see the contradictions at the core of these movies, I don’t know what else to say.
Dan you’re 48 and you haven’t read 1984 or Brave New World? That is tragic.
I don’t know why I’m engaging with you…you’re not fun. But let’s take you at face value. Instead of listing films that were more honest about gays than Brokeback, instead of slagging off the Dark Knight, why don’t you actually MAKE YOUR CASE and name a film that introduces a post-apocalyptic dystopia but doesn’t, in your terms, merely congratulate the audience for its squishy liberal prejudices? Something that maybe stimulates more activism? I mean, surely you don’t mean The Road Warrior, right? So go ahead – make YOUR argument coherent instead of just firing and inspiring ire.
WALL-E might be a merely GOOD film in your opinion, but it only “doesn’t deserve” to be nominated IF YOU CAN FIND FIVE BETTER FILMS DURING 2008.
I can find at least 20 better films, but I’ll just throw in my Top 5 for the year:
1) “Synecdoche, New York”
2) “Revolutionary Road”
3) “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
4) “The Dark Knight”
5) “The Wrestler”
Now, I know that while very deserving, “The Wrestler”’s chances for a nomination are dim. As for “Synecdoche, New York”, THE best film of the year, the Academy would never have the balls to nominate it, except maybe for Best Original Screenplay. Just maybe.
Nevertheless, I’m completely sure this film will be recognized as the logic-defying and brain-challenging masterpiece it is over time. Very much like that little film called “2001: A Space Odyssey”…
Taking all that into account, the following are the films that should be the Best Picture Oscar nominees:
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
“The Dark Knight”
“Milk” (*)
“Revolutionary Road”
“Slumdog Millionaire” (*)
(*) “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Milk” rank 6th and 7th, respectively, in my list of best of the year.
As for my opinion on “Wall-E”, check out comment #16.
Sorry Dan. Just change “yuppie” for “poster boy for middle age crisis” then =D.
If you guys can’t see the contradictions at the core of these movies, I don’t know what else to say.
If there weren’t contradictions at the core of them, they probably wouldn’t be such great movies. Duh.
You beat me to it, Paul. The most fascinating people are like webs of contradiction, and great films are the same way. Simple messages belong on protest banners, not in movies; movies are too big to house such tiny communication.
In WALL-E’s case, the ambivalence is what saves the film. If it had been a more single-minded treatise against hyper-commercialism, it would have been unwatchably self-righteous. Even as it is, it got uncomfortably close to that in parts; but that’s probably just because I like Wal-Mart so much.
Daniel S-R – Bladerunner, Code 46, Serenity, 1984, Alphaville, Children of Men, A Clockwork Orange, Metropolis, off the top of my head.
I think the way the Academy determines Best Picture nominations is stupid and confusing. Why not just have ever member rate a movie on a scale of 1 to 10 and the 5 highest scoring movies get a nomination.
Here’s a good message I took from Wall-e. Maybe some people need to get there asses off or there fucking Rascals, spend less time on there computers and go live there life, (which includes as Kelly so wornderfully put it getting laid, it really does you wornders) or they may end up like the people in the movie. If the movie upset any fat kids it may be worth it if it may have inspired them to maybe join the football team or take up ultimate frisbee or something like that.
I’m not anti-fat just anti lazy. If your obese and use a Rascal to motor yourself around wall-mart are you even trying? And also don’t say that this movie caused me to be so harsh I have always thought that.
What was that bunch of bullshit about how activity is so terrible because it leads to bigitry and wars and shit like that? You got to be fucking kidding me. Lazy people can be biggots too and a fat guy can push a button to send a missile into a middle eastern village just like anyone else. Do you really know how a war works its lazy old people picking fights and young athletic kids having to go die for them.
Fair enough Dan, your argument now makes 10x as much sense. Well, I’m not so sure those films didn’t confirm as many limousine-liberal prejudices as Wall-E. But I think setting the film 700 years in the future makes Wall-E both more and less radical than those films can be…on the one hand, we’re very far removed from that century and thus less responsible for it; on the other hand, if things are *still* that bad then, we musta *really* screwed up back in the 21st. But I don’t see life on the Axiom as the presented paradise you feel it was; and if, as my friend learned in architecture school, Blade Runner has had a sort of reverse-influence, telling people what NOT to do with the future (and perhaps helping the Frank Gehry-led whimsy-based movements since the film came out), then I hope that likewise Wall-E reverse-influences us not to sit in hoverchairs with big gulps letting computers run our lives.
THIS is the nominating process? It makes no sense. Why have a ranking system when the nominees themselves aren’t ranked (i.e. they don’t say, ‘No Country For Old Men is the #1 nominee, Juno is the #2 nominee,’ etc.)? I always figured the voters just put their favourite five movies into the slots and then the PriceWaterhouseCoopers guys added up the totals and whichever five movies got the most votes got in.
Personally, I loved Children of Men and found Code 46 very intriguing.
Wall-e’s second half seems cartoonish to me.
“Wall-e’s second half seems cartoonish to me.”
Uhm, mind you, it IS a cartoon, after all.
We’re ragging on preferential balloting now?
It’s superior to a point-adding system because it ensures that all five of the Best Picture nominees are someone’s favorite. What’s the point of nominating a movie for BP if it’s not going to pull any votes for the win?
WALL-E is the best film of 2008.
So, it’s clear where I stand on this promising development. I would dance in the streets if it happened.
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