And the Loser is: Anime

In my younger years, I was patently obsessed with the Oscars. Not because of the glamor or anything like that. I just loved movies, and every year there is a big, ostentatious show that lasts for three hours that just celebrates movies. Luckily, they *also* celebrate the types of filmmaking that a mere mention on a major broadcast event gives them the widest exposure anyone could hope for. Don Hertzfeldt was content to make his silly, increasingly avant-garde stick figure cartoons in relative obscurity, until 2000’s “Rejected” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject. Suddenly, he had Hollywood’s ear, turning down commercial offers left and right, while his audience exploded. Everyone tunes in to see the big stars walk down the red carpet, but it’s impossible to put a price on the sheer magnitude of exposure that an Academy Award nomination will lend to an independent feature, or documentary, or short film.

Anime is always an outlier in these awards, though, for reasons that, from the outside looking in, seem unfair or prejudiced. On every level, objectively, A Silent Voice is a better movie than The Boss Baby. Pretending otherwise seems absurd and obscene. Still, it’s important to realize how the voting process works for these awards shows, and how hostile they are not just to anime, but independently produced films of all stripes. There’s a laundry list of seemingly arbitrary stipulations and costly submission fees just to meet the minimum requirements for eligibility, and once you’re eligible, how do you get your film noticed to voters?

Let’s take a look both at the rules and regulations for submitting an animated feature for the Oscars.

ELIGIBILITY

You can’t win an award if you’re not eligible for it! The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has their entire rules and regulations for submission on their web portal, but I’ll go ahead and snip out the relevant text.

For the sake of the Oscars, *ALL* feature films submitted for *ANY* awards need to meet this minimum criteria:

“All eligible motion pictures, unless otherwise noted (see Paragraph 9, below), must be:
a. feature length (defined as over 40 minutes),
b. publicly exhibited by means of 35mm or 70mm film, or in a 24-or 48-frame progressive scan Digital Cinema format with a minimum projector resolution of 2048 by 1080 pixels, source image format conforming to ST 428–1:2006 D-Cinema Distribution Master — Image Characteristics; image compression (if used) conforming to ISO/IEC 15444–1 (JPEG 2000); and image and sound file formats suitable for exhibition in commercial Digital Cinema sites. (Blu-ray format does not meet Digital Cinema requirements.)
c. for paid admission in a commercial motion picture theater in Los Angeles County,
d. for a qualifying run of at least seven consecutive days, during which period screenings must occur at least three times daily, with at least one screening beginning between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m.daily,
e. advertised and exploited during their Los Angeles County qualifying run in a manner normal and customary to theatrical feature distribution practices, and
f. released within the Awards year deadlines specified in Rule Three.”

Before a single ballot is cast, the barrier to entry to even be considered for any Oscar is that you have your film screened for at least one week, three times a day in a Los Angeles-area theater. Film festivals don’t count. Benefit screenings or special events don’t count either. You need to get your film booked in a theater in the area, and you need to promote it in the rather vague way that the Los Angeles based film industry describes “a manner normal and customary to theatrical feature distribution practices,” whatever that is.

To put it simply, this is expensive. To qualify for an Oscar without a major distributor to count on to deliver your film to a commercial movie theater, most independent productions simply rent out an LA theater for a week to make that requirement. That in itself isn’t cheap — the theaters tend to realize that they’re going to take a loss by booking your independent film instead of Star Wars. Then you have to advertise it. That means a pricey ad buy in the same avenues where the major studios are going to outspend you by leaps and bounds. The Oscars eligibility requirements force you to buy ads in the film trades like Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, or on major film blogs with large amounts of traffic. Already we’re talking about thousands of thousands of dollars, simply to be eligible.

The Animated Feature Category also has its own rules. Here’s the AMPAS definition of what constitutes an “Animated Feature”:

“I. DEFINITION
An animated film is defined as a motion picture in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique, and usually falls into one of the two general fields of animation: narrative or abstract. Some of the techniques of animating films include but are not limited to hand-drawn animation, computer animation, stop-motion, clay animation, pixilation, cutout animation, pinscreen, camera multiple pass imagery, kaleidoscopic effects created frame-by-frame, and drawing on the film frame itself. Motion capture and real-time puppetry are not by themselves animation techniques.
An animated short film has a running time of 40 minutes or less. An animated feature film has a running time of more than 40 minutes. In an animated film, animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture’s running time. In addition, a narrative animated film must have a significant number of the 8 major characters animated. If the picture is created in a cinematic style that could be mistaken for live action, the filmmaker(s) must also submit information supporting how and why the picture is substantially a work of animation rather than live action.”

All those notes about “percentage” of animation instead of live-action seem weird, but think about, for example, the recent Alvin & The Chipmunks movies. By the Academy’s definition, those are animated features! They were eligible! That’s relevant to this next portion:

“II. ELIGIBILITY
A. Except as indicated above, motion pictures in this category must meet all the requirements in Academy Awards Rules Two, Three and Four.
B. At least eight eligible animated features must have been theatrically released in Los Angeles County within the calendar year for this category to be activated.”

Essentially, if less than 8 animated films are deemed eligible for the award, there’s no Animated Feature category that year. That hasn’t happened yet, but consider this — ever wonder why some years there’s only three films nominated for the Animated Feature category, and other years there’s five? The Voting rules explain how this works:

“B. All submitted eligible films will be made available to the Animated Feature Nominating Committee. The committee will vote by secret ballot to nominate from 2 to 5 motion pictures for this award. In any year in which 8 to 12 animated feature films are released in Los Angeles County and submitted for consideration, either 2 or 3 motion pictures may be nominated. In any year in which 13 to 15 animated feature films are released and submitted, a maximum of 4 motion pictures may be nominated. In any year in which 16 or more animated feature films are released and submitted, a maximum of 5 motion pictures may be nominated.”

For reference, this year, there were 26 (!) feature films eligible for the award. Of those 26, the following anime features were eligible:

In This Corner of the World
Mary and the Witch’s Flower
Napping Princess
A Silent Voice
Sword Art Online: The Movie — Ordinal Scale

Note that Your Name isn’t listed, because that was actually submitted for the award the previous year. A solid argument could be made that four of those films deserved a nomination, or even a win. I suppose you could do the same for the fifth one too, and I recommend you do it, because it would be a really funny thing to read.

(Sidenote: the fact that Kadokawa and A-1 Pictures spent such an amount of time, money, and energy in their Quixotic quest to get Sword Art Online nominated for an Oscar was so insanely funny to me when I started writing this that it took me out of it for several days. Nothing could better sum up what a foolish game this is than Reki Kawahara begging Aniplex to get his light novel movie an Oscar nomination.)

There have been several instances where the number of “eligible” animated features were one or two submissions short to expand the category to a full five — which would’ve certainly increased the chances of an anime showing up, were it not for studios like Fox or Sony deciding that submitting Alvin & the Chipmunks or The Smurfs wasn’t worth their time. In this case, the sheer number of eligible films more than likely worked against them. I’ll refer to this snippet on who does the voting:

“A. A chairperson, appointed by the Academy President, shall head the Animated Feature Nominating Committee. An invitational letter will be sent to all active and life Academy members, requesting their participation. Those serving on the committee will be required to see a minimum percentage of submitted eligible films as defined by the then-current procedures.”

Emphasis mine there on “minimum percentage.” What percentage is that? Nobody outside of the Animated Feature Nominating Committee knows! And we’re unlikely to ever know ourselves. The Oscars, being the most famous awards show in town, has it in their best interest to keep their procedures a secret. But this is the point I want to stress: the voters DO NOT have to have seen all the eligible films. Even if the “minimum percentage” is something like 75 percent, that still leaves four or five films that you’re officially not required to watch!

And this is where I’d like to point out just who, exactly, makes up the AMPAS membership. It’s a very exclusive invite-only club, according to their membership page:

Members of the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch are filmmakers, artistic craftspeople,
and those who have made notable contributions to the field. To be considered for invitation to membership, an individual must:

(a) have at least two theatrical film screen credits in a key creative role of a caliber which, in the opinion of the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch Executive Committee, reflect the high standards of the Academy,

and\or

(b) have been nominated for an Academy Award in a Short Films category
(theatrical live action and animated short films), or the Animated Feature Film category.

or

(c) have, in the judgment of the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch Executive Committee, otherwise achieved unique distinction, earned special merit or made an outstanding contribution within the person’s field of endeavor.”

In short, if you get a nomination, you’re in. If you don’t, but they like you, you’re in. If not, well, keep trying. I probably shouldn’t need to point out how largely biased the membership is to people working within the Los Angeles-area studio system, but I will anyway. When the “high standards of the Academy” are routinely proven to be a joke (Crash), I’ll bet it helps to get an invite when you’re all friends in the same vicinity!

EDIT: Thanks to @akaPassion on Twitter, the big story of the past year in this category is about the voting process — before this year, the Animated Feature category was chosen by a select “craft-based group.” Now, the entire Academy pool of voters gets to select the nominees. There were murmurs that this change would disproportionately affect independent and foreign films, and this year’s nominees largely bear that out.

Putting it simply, the majority of the Academy membership are colleagues for the major studios, who all have a vested interest in their work, and their friends’ work, being represented in their category. If you have to watch 20 of the 26 eligible features to vote in the category, which 20 are you going to watch — the films made by major studios and created by your friends and colleagues (many of which you’ve probably seen already), or the foreign and independent productions, created by animators and artists for whom Academy membership is less important?

There’s a lot more to discuss here, but I’d be here all week. The Oscars are a way for the employees of major studios like Disney and Universal to congratulate each other’s work and occasionally those of a foreign and independent production — provided they pay the upfront cost of submission, have it screened at the right theaters, and buy ads in the right places. It is intentionally hostile to outside productions, especially in the Animated Feature category, which is relatively new in the Academy’s history.

I got to see Don Hertzfeldt’s newest short, The World of Tomorrow: Part 2, at the Drafthouse here in San Francisco a month ago. Before the screening, Hertzfeldt came out to introduce it, and leadenly added “So, the Oscar shortlist that decides the short film nominees — my film didn’t even make it past the first round of voting.” A chorus of boos followed. “Actually,” he inhaled, “it’s great. I don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

If you liked this, let me know on Twitter or email — because boy, if you think the Oscars screwed up this year, I have some bad news about the Annie Awards.

— Brian