Passing a crucial test of characters
A good screenplay is a seed from which a good movie can grow. For that reason, you might expect the Oscars for screenplays to track closely those for best picture. That has not been the case. Screenplay Oscars -- and nominations, especially -- have often gone to films that were unlikely best picture candidates. It's that history that gives some hope to admirers of Pixar's "The Incredibles," which has been nominated for best original screenplay. Computer-animated films have been enormously popular for 10 years, but when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created a separate Oscar for best animated feature in 2001, it effectively excluded them from the best-picture competition. Since then, animated features have had to make do with two writing nominations and no wins.
In this year's competition, "The Incredibles" and its writer-director, Brad Bird, are up against four live-action films, including one nominee for best picture, "The Aviator." Given the academy's history of segregating animated features, there's scant reason to hope "The Incredibles" will break the losing string.
There are many reasons to wish that it would. "The Incredibles" is a comedy about a superhero family, but there's no mistaking it for kiddie trash. It's an ambitious film distinguished by its intelligence, mastery of craft, and underlying serious tone.
"The Incredibles" is the favorite to win the Oscar for best animated feature, but, as usual, the field there is much thinner. Not only is "The Incredibles" up against just two other films, "Shrek 2" and "Shark Tale," but both are from the same studio, DreamWorks, and both are, compared with the Pixar-Disney entry, cynical and seedy. By contrast, a win for "The Incredibles" in the original-screenplay category would be animation's most dramatic escape from its cinematic ghetto since the 1991 best-picture nomination for Disney's "Beauty and the Beast."
"Original" means only that a screenplay is not based on previously produced or published material, but some comic-book fans complain that "The Incredibles" fails that modest test. They see in the film strong reminders of such vintage comic books as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's "Fantastic Four" as well as more recent efforts that include Alan Moore's "Watchmen" and Brian Michael Bendis' "Powers." Like "The Incredibles," "Watchmen" and "Powers" visualize unsettling consequences if superpowered beings really existed.
- The Race for Best Picture Grows Animated Nov 14, 2004
- Exhibitions on View at Film Academy Jul 13, 1996
- A baker's dozen of nominations for 'Ratatouille' Dec 04, 2007
