In this morning’s roundup of Oscar news ‘n’ notes from around the web, the Feature Animation category faces another hurdle as it strains to reach the magic number.
For the Oscar Animated Feature race to have any chance of producing five nominees this year, it can’t afford to lose a single entrant. (With fewer than 16 eligible films, there will only be three nominees.) That’s one reason why the lawsuit detailed by Eriq Gardner is troubling not just to Sony Pictures Classics, but to the entire animation community. Illusionist Distribution, which says it owns the rights to the 2006 Ed Norton/Paul Giamatti film “The Illusionist,” is suing SPC to stop the release of Sylvain Chomet’s new animated film called “The Illusionist,” which they say constitutes trademark infringement and unfair competition and will “cause substantial confusion … and mislead a substantial number of consumers.” Besides, the first “Illusionist” already put up with problems that caused confusion: it came out the same year as Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige,” which had a storyline that’s certainly more similar than the one in Chomet’s film. (THR, Esq.)
Pete Hammond also looks at the Animated Feature race, and comes up with the same 14 entrants that theWrap rounded up last Friday – which, he says, was around the time that potential voters received a memo from AMPAS saying that field stood at 14, but could hit 16 by the November 1 deadline. Since we’re that close, will it prompt Warner Bros. to submit “Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” or are we depending on a couple of foreign entries coming out of nowhere? (Deadline)
Guy Lodge, a Brit, talks about his countrymen who are in the running this year, focusing on “The King’s Speech,” “Made in Dagenham” and “Another Year.” He thinks that the key to the former is that it’s not just a period piece, it’s also funny; that “Dagenham” is even lighter but will be helped by its social conscience; and that the last of those films is “a bona fide art movie,” a type of British film that has never won Best Picture but could somehow capture the mood of the electorate this year. “The British are not only coming,” he says, “they’re coming from very different places.” (In Contention)
Inspired by the impending release of “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” Michael Hogan talks to former computer hacker Kevin Poulsen about how accurate leading character Lisbeth Salander’s hacking activities are. His conclusion: what she does is plausible, but the way she does it is nonsensical. Then Hogan poses a series of real-life scenarios, and asks how difficult they’d be to pull off. Awards watchers may be relieved to learn that while it’s a medium difficulty task to siphon a few million dollars into a Swiss bank account, and easy to get a message onto the homepage of the New York Times, Poulsen thinks it’s “hard to wholly impossible” to fix the Oscars. Of course, if they ever go to online voting, that could change in a hurry … (Vanity Fair)
