Commentary by Devin McCue, Sumner Newscow — Happy Sunday. And welcome back to a miniseries of CultureCow articles called Devin Fixes the Oscars.

As I’ve repeatedly lamented, the Academy Awards are a tired and broken system. Their nomination process is corrupt, their voting criteria reward mediocrity, and no matter how hard they try, they always screw up big moments (think Chadwick Boseman’s Best Actor Award or Green Book’s Best Picture win).

Plenty of awards shows are just as bad, if not worse than the Oscars, but it isn’t the same for a few key reasons. The biggest among them is that plenty of musicians are huge successes without ever seeing a Grammy. Emmys are hardly the marker of true success in Television. Oscars, on the other hand, will make someone’s career.

For the rest of their lives, winners are listed as “academy award-winning…” before their names and receive more money because of it. It doesn’t matter if they only won for a bit part in a much better movie or just a weak category for that year; the accolade is the same. And that goes double for directors.

The Oscars have a level of prestige that no other American awards show has, for better or worse, and that’s what makes them so aggravating. And I consider one aspect of the Oscars more broken than all the others: the animation category.

The Award for Best Animated Feature is a relatively young honor for the Oscars, having only appeared in 2002 in order to prevent Shrek from winning Best Picture. The Academy shunned animated films almost entirely before that, save for a few Disney nominations and a special consideration for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The Academy’s disdain for animation morphed over the years into a misunderstanding of it and now, the award oscillates from rewarding the best kid’s movie to a rare Studio Ghibli film. So, here’s how to fix them:

Choose an Identity

The first step is to decide what the hell this category is finally.

If it’s meant to pick the best kid’s movie every year, that’s fine, but let’s call it that. Children’s entertainment is a lot harder than it’s given credit for and it’s a genre that deserves recognition, but that hardly means it’s all animated. Just this year, a live-action Blue’s Clues movie was released that doesn’t qualify as animated but is absolutely for children.

Instead of forcing all animated and juvenile movies together, the Academy should split them off into the Best Animated Feature category we already know and a Best Feature for Children award. That frees the category actually to focus on animated films and leads to my next point…

Go International

This is a critique of the Oscars every year. They have no idea how much of the world they should acknowledge. If they allow films from all over the globe a chance at the prize, American films like Avatar 2 and Top Gun Maverick won’t get nominations. But if they don’t allow any, they’ll be (rightly) exposed as too American-centric.

One only needs to remember Bong-Joon Ho’s playful dig at the Oscars as a “local awards show” a few years back.

The animation category is the perfect place to allow more international competition, however, because other countries are far more inventive than America in animation and might encourage some competition.

While most countries with movies have strong animation industries, including France and a recent rise in Chinese animated films, Japan is the obvious competitor. Japanese anime has a unique style and visual language to it, but what’s important here is the source material.

Almost all anime comes from Japanese comics called manga and are targeted at all age groups instead of just children. This allows industry to tell more diverse and adult stories that Disney and DreamWorks simply can’t.

While Puss n’ Boots is an excellent movie, it can’t tell a story unsuitable for 9-year-olds.

Kill the “Disney-fication” of Animation

Disney is an excellent animation studio that’s brought us some of the best-animated films ever. The influence and quality of Pixar alone can’t be celebrated enough.

In that time, however, the American industry has drilled their style down to hyper-realistic, too-perfect, and round iterations of people and animals so that every film, even non-Disney ones, looks like it came from Pixar Studios.

It doesn’t help that the second-most successful animation studio, DreamWorks, was started by a former Disney executive.

The hold on the industry is so complete that any deviation is rewarded, even if it’s the hideous gremlins of Illumination’s Minions. Puss n’ Boots, one of the favorites for this year’s nominees, received heaps of praise for the experimental animation styles in merely some of its scenes.

Then, there’s Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.

Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican filmmaker best known for fantasy movies like Pan’s Labyrinth and the Shape of Water. It was a big surprise when he announced he was doing a stop-animation Pinocchio movie. Then, it was an even bigger surprise when the Pinocchio movie became the best stop-animation film in history.

Del Toro proved that you could tell an adult story, even one kid can understand with animation in America. His Pinocchio goes to war for Mussolini and speaks to the personification of Death on multiple occasions. If you haven’t seen it yet, do so as soon as you can.

The difference in style, technique, writing, and acknowledgment is vital if this category succeeds, and the Academy isn’t going to see that. So, with all my recommendations to fix the Oscars in mind, the biggest one is still this: expel everyone from the current Academy and start fresh.

Meme of the week

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