Oscars 2014: The Little Techies (Best Animated Feature, Best Costume Design, and more)
With the Oscars airing on Sunday, and with the Manifesto having finally wrapped up its rankings of every 2014 release, it’s time to get down to brass tacks and analyze the 21 feature categories. We’ll begin with the technical categories. This post will cover “the little guys”—the fields you probably don’t care that much about but that nevertheless recognize important contributions to a movie’s overall worth.
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
NOMINEES
Big Hero 6
The Boxtrolls
How to Train Your Dragon 2
Song of the Sea
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
WILL WIN
The LEGO Movie. Guh. But with the year’s most critically and commercially successful animated film mysteriously missing the cut, there’s a bit of intrigue to be found here. The Boxtrolls has its admirers, but in all likelihood, this will come down to a battle between two studio-backed heavy hitters in Fox’s How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Disney’s (not Pixar’s, as my friend Katie chastised me last month) Big Hero 6. The former is arguably at a disadvantage because it’s a sequel, whereas the latter is an original production (in case you’re confused, Big Hero 6 is not the sixth installment in the “Big Hero” franchise). In the brief 13-year history of this category, the only retread to win the award is Toy Story 3 (defeating the original How to Train Your Dragon, in point of fact), and that was also a Best Picture nominee—How to Train Your Dragon 2 isn’t operating with that level of cachet. Still, it’s a more classically beautifully and stirring film than the fun but familiar Big Hero 6, and I’m guessing voters will respond to its childlike sense of wonder. How to Train Your Dragon 2 takes it.