NY Times Helps Pixar Lobby for Best Picture Oscar

A new story in the New York Times Carpetbagger blog, which focuses on the entertainment scene, reads half like a puff piece for Pixar and half like plea from animators who feel like Rodney Dangerfield, they just can’t get no respect.

The Pixar team would dearly love to win a best picture Oscar. “I would be overwhelmed with emotion, I think, that our peers recognized how we make our films, and that we use the same tools and that we take ourselves so seriously,” said Darla K. Anderson, a producer of “Toy Story 3” who has been with Pixar for 18 years. Their painstaking approach “has been with this ferocity of intensity,” she added, “to make a great movie, plain and simple — not a great animated film, but a great film.”

But don’t get your hopes up.

It’s still unlikely that the Academy will reward animation on the broader scale of cinema just yet. But the top award would be especially sweet for “Toy Story 3,” whose plotline — about growing up and letting go of the totems of your past, your own imaginative history — mirrors that of the company and filmmakers working on it.

Toy Story 3 was the highest grossing film and the best reviewed. Animation is an art form where ever pixel is placed exactly where it’s supposed to be by someone. Really the ultimate in film craft. Maybe this is the year where the academy realizes its value. And maybe I’ll fly to work on a hover car tomorrow.