Look who's up for an Oscar!

Even before the first-ever Oscar for best animated film is handed out Sunday night, there's a touch of controversy about the award.

Why are there only three nominees, when most award categories have five?

Why do the three contenders – "Shrek," "Monsters, Inc.," and "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius" – all represent the new breed of computer-generated cartoons, shutting out the old-fashioned hand-drawn kind?

And should this award even exist? The academy has gotten along for decades without giving cartoons their own category. Can't animations compete for the Best Picture prize like other films do – comedies, dramas, the works – and win or lose on their own merits?

There's an easy answer to the first question. Under rules drawn up for the new category, at least 12 feature- length animations must reach theaters in a given year for a slate of five to be nominated. The nominees drop to three if fewer than 12 animations are released – and the category will be passed over if the number is less than eight.

This seems fair, since categories such as documentary and foreign-language film also operate under special (if different) rules.

The second question raises trickier issues. All of this year's candidates are products of Hollywood's latest animation contraptions. They don't rely on hand-drawn pictures, or even on computer-enhanced versions of these. They're anchored in computer-generated imagery (CGI) from the "get-go," giving the illusion of a more "three-dimensional" appearance than traditional 'toons have.

No one claims these movies aren't animations, even if studios puff with pride over the lifelike realism they convey.

Still, they're a far cry from the classic style of a "Pinocchio" or "Lady and the Tramp," which were brushed to life by meticulous fingers in countless hours of painstaking labor.

Films in that handmade mold don't really exist anymore; even a traditional-looking cartoon like this year's "Return to Never Land" has obvious computer-bred qualities.

But several releases with a somewhat traditional 2-D look are slated for theaters this year, and older viewers have nostalgic affection for their time-tested ambience.

So some wonder why this year's contest is a three-way race of 3-D contenders.

Did it take CGI to finally call Oscar's attention to the value of cartoons? Or is this a sly slap at old-fangled animation, skewing public attention – and the box-office profits an Oscar win brings – toward the kind of product Hollywood now prefers to make?

The answer is probably no on both counts.

Animation advocates have long supported an Oscar for their field, but Hollywood tends to move slowly on this front – it's been almost 20 years since the academy last created a new award. As for charges of bias toward 2-D cartooning, it's likely that nominators simply went for the movies that most impressed them.

And remember that ticket-window grosses are never far from Oscar's mind.

"Shrek" and "Monsters, Inc." were monster hits. The more traditional "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" and the mixed-bag movie "Osmosis Jones" weren't.

'Nuff said?

Then there's that third issue, the most contentious of them all.

Page: 1 | 2