The Snub

As The Guardian puts it.

It was the highest-grossing film of 2014 in the UK, holds a staggering rating of 96% “fresh” on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes and has been widely praised as a pioneering example of how to mine movie gold from the most unlikely of corporate sources. But The Lego Movie still wasn’t good enough to make the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ list of nominees for the best animated film Oscar.

In one of the biggest snubs of this year’s award season, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s flamboyant tale lost out to Big Hero 6, How to Train Your Dragon 2 and The Boxtrolls, as well as Song of the Sea and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. ...

We need to get over "The Lego Movie was snubbed snubbed/screwed over/ignored" line of thinking. It's actually just simple math. A committee voted for the nominees. The votes were counted. And the top five nominees won.

Really simple.

Further, the votes were/are all subjective, held captive by the opinions/whims/prejudices of voting members. (Side note: This is why an animated feature will never, ever win a Best Picture Oscar. The voting members of the Motion Picture Academy, most of them working in live-action, would never allow such a thing to happen.)

My guess is The Lego Movie finished just out of the money. But it's only a guess. I don't know Best Animated Feature nominees' vote totals and I don't think it's particularly important. The Academy Awards are among the oldest, most "prestigious" gold trophies out there and actual movie makers create and vote on the different slates, but plenty of lacklustre films have bee nominated over the years, and too many iconic films have been left out. Just how seriously are we to take this exclusion? (We know which movie's going to win, right? How to Train Your Dragon 2 of Big Hero 6. Simple math.)

So is the Academy's overlook of The Lego Movie something to get upset about? Maybe a little. But certainly not a lot. After all, it's just another movie award*.


* More important than the Golden Globes. (Way more important.) Less important than the Nobel Prize for Literature.