Animated Feature Film
- Big Hero 6
- The Boxtrolls
- How to Train Your Dragon 2
- Song of the Sea
- The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
SNUBS: The Lego Movie
WILL WIN: How to Train Your Dragon 2
SHOULD WIN: The Lego Movie
The category
that Pixar built remains an albatross outflown only by the disgrace that
the Documentary Feature category has become. It seems an annual tradition now
that the Academy simply cannot nominate the clear winner.
- CitizenFour
- Finding Vivian Maier
- Last Days in Vietnam
- The Salt of the Earth
- Virunga
SNUBS: Red Army, Tim’s Vermeer, Life Itself, An Open Secret
WILL WIN: Citizen Four
SHOULD WIN: No one.
The four
films I listed as snubs are all traditional documentaries, i.e. films that
document. The five films that the academy nominated document the outsized ego
of the filmmakers and the conformism of the Academy’s politics. All are propaganda
at best and advertisements at worst. Or perhaps advertisements at best and
propaganda at worst. It’s hard to determine which is a greater offense – the shopping
network sales pitch in Finding Vivian Maier or the Comintern propaganda tactics
of the rest. They all approximate the truth in equally inaccurate measure. The
Academy has lost all semblance of what a documentary is or should be in its mania
for self-congratulation over its political passions. Perhaps most problematic,
in each of these tropes, the documentarian(s) go(es) out of their way to market
themselves as bit, even central, players in the reality they concoct and the
merchandise they’re hocking. What a foul irony that the core tool set of
socialist documentarians is uninhibited self-promotion and unbridled
materialism.
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