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Oscar Finds "Nemo," "Looney Tunes"
Grab Oscar, dude!
Finding Nemo, the blockbuster Disney-Pixar aquatic adventure that has become the top-grossing 'toon of all time, leads the list of contenders for the Best Animated Feature Academy Award.
For the third year in a row, the board of governors at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has received enough entries to award an Oscar in the animated feature category. A minimum of eight films needs to be deemed eligible in order for the Oscar to be awarded; 11 films made the cut this year.
Aside from Nemo, there are three other Disney flicks in the running: Brother Bear, The Jungle Book 2 and Piglet's Big Movie. They'll be joined by Warner Bros.' live-action-animated hybrid Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Miramax's Pokémon Heroes and Paramount's Rugrats Go Wild!.
In a category first, Japanese anime master Satoshi Kon became the only filmmaker to have two films qualify in the same year, the DreamWorks-distributed Millennium Actress and the upcoming Samuel Goldwyn/IDP release Tokyo Godfathers.
Two other imports hope to give Kon and Disney a run for their money: Sony Pictures Classics' French-backed entry, The Triplets of Belleville, and the German-produced Jester Till. Those films, along with Tokyo Godfathers, won't be eligible unless they make a theatrical run in Los Angeles before December 31.
Curiously, missing in action from the Oscar race is DreamWorks' Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. That big-budgeted animated swashbuckler, which featured the voices of Brad Pitt, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michelle Pfeiffer, was never entered by the studio, which declined to state a reason.
Per Academy rules, the Oscar ballot (due out January 27) should include three of the 11 Best Animated Feature contenders. (If more than 16 films had been submitted, five films would ultimately have competed for the statuette.)
Since the category was created in 2000, the Academy has stipulated that at least eight films would have to be deemed eligible each year in order for an Oscar to be awarded. Last year, 17 films were in contention, and of the five eventual nominees, Hayao Miyakazi's Spirited Away emerged as the winner.
To qualify, submitted films must be at least 70 minutes long, contain a minimum of 75 percent animation and employ one of three styles: traditional cel drawing, stop-motion or computer-generated images.
The Looney Tunes entry, released last week, melds live-action footage of actors Brendan Fraser, Jenna Elfman and Steve Martin with such classic 'toon characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd. The Oscar folks found that the film was mostly animated, and so it passed muster.
Frontrunner status already belongs to Finding Nemo. Arguably the best-reviewed movie of the year, the clown fish saga has sharked $334 million at the U.S. box office alone and is already a bestselling DVD, with more than 15 million copies sold after just two weeks of release.
The 2003 Academy Awards ceremony is scheduled for February 29 in Los Angeles.
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