CULTURAS IN VITRO
In a Digitally Animated World, Oscar Stands Rigid: The categories offered by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences continue to reflect a primordial, analog mind-set - as if the board of governors had decided that allowing sound recording into the competition, back in 1930, was enough of a concession to newfangled techniques. [...]
Rather than face up to this fundamental shift in aesthetics, the academy has insisted on clouding the digital issue. Last year, a new award for best animated film was introduced. It was promptly won by "Shrek," a cartoon feature created not on the drawing board but on the computer monitor, by artist-technicians manipulating a variety of complex image-generating programs.
So why was "Shrek" considered an animated film last year while this year, "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," nominated in the best-picture category, is not? The simple presence of a few human actors is not enough.
Academy rules specify that 75 percent of a film must use animated effects for it to qualify for the animation category. That's a condition that "The Two Towers" almost certainly fulfills (not that I've seen it with a stopwatch in hand), given the ubiquity of animated supporting characters, digitally retouched photography and vast castles, caverns and fantasy landscapes spun entirely out of pixels. But no. "The Two Towers" is real; "Ice Age" (which uses the same technology to create its backgrounds, and which was nominated this year for animated feature) is not.