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The State of Things

© Enoch Allen

I assure you. If you paid enough attention to my short introductory monologue before you clicked on the link that brought you to this article, perhaps you already have a grasp of what's to come.

More bitching, more moaning. This time around, though, I promised to make my bitching and moaning more entertaining.

I'll begin with the highlight of the 75th Academy Awards-the Spirited Away win. Not even I placed much stock in Spirited Away taking anything but the nomination home when all was said and done. After all, I figured the Academy to be comprised of shallow, fickle individuals-I mean, how else can you explain the nominations of The Time Machine and Frida in the Best Makeup category? All the blood, the sweat, and the tears that the makeup crew of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers poured into making the cast look as sumptuous, valid, and legitimate as can be expected, and they weren't even recognized with a nomination in that category? Makeup that was far superior in comparison to both The Time Machine and Frida combined, thrown into a blender, competing in the Olympics-any of your choice of allusions-and the Towers crew not only gets insulted, but disrespected as the Oscar that they should've rightfully had goes to a crew who performed a competent, but ultimately inferior, job-a job that consisted mainly of routine blush sessions and mustache sculpting. No matter how intelligent I will eventually get-or how dumb-I will never see the logic of the nomination process, at least where Best Makeup is concerned.

But I gather that the people who do a botch job of nominating the aforementioned pictures in the aforementioned category weren't the same people who were engaged in nominating the Best Animated Films. In a rare move that deserves praise, I must say that those were some great choices (perhaps with an exception to Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, but I can rest easy now). And the astonishment still did not let up, when many Anime aficionados watched the clear definition of an underdog, Spirited Away, take home the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. I was floored. Even as the rather lengthy awards show dragged on, I remained speechless.

There just was no greater shock or elation then having finally realized that Hayao Miyazaki and the extremely talented animators who worked with him were, at last, honored in an appropriate fashion. That single gesture from the Academy renewed my hope, that serious animation will eventually get the recognition that they deserve, and in the process will enhance the medium as a whole.

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