2024 Oscar Nominations Revealed
It's nearly that time of year again. The great and the good of Hollywood and the global film industry comes together for an annual celebration of the art of cinema. Of course... it's The Oscars. And today, the nominations have been announced for the 2024 Academy Awards.
Naturally, we're here to talk about the animation categories
The nominees for Best Animated Feature for 2024 are Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse from Sony Pictures Animation, The Boy And The Heron from Studio Ghibli, Elemental from Pixar, Nimona from Annapurna and Netflix and the French/Spanish independent feature Robot Dreams. The latter would appear to be the biggest surprise but has been something of a festival darling. It has previously won the Special Jury Prize at Animation Is Film Festival, the Contrechamp Award at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Buncheon International Animation Festival as well as being nominated for five Annie Awards. Looked at through that lens it begins to seem like less of an outsider.
If you have been following this year's Awards season, you would be forgiven for seeing this is as a two-horse race. Across The Spier-Verse and The Boy And The Heron are way out in front. Spider-Verse has 62 wins so far out of 142 nominations compared to The Boy And The Heron's 19 wins from 74 nominations. Spider-Man obviously has to be considered the favourite to take home the little gold man, but Hayao Miyazaki is a proven Oscar winner. The narrative behind the film, with him coming out of retirement, and some places (inaccurately) labelling it his final film may work in his favour. With all that said it's never wise to count out Pixar- who along with Disney have often been favoured by the Academy.
In the animated short film the nominees are: Letter To A Pig from Tal Kantor and Amit R. Gicelter, Ninety-Five Senses, Jerusha Hess and Jared Hess, Our Uniform by Yegane Moghaddam, PachyDerme by Stephanie Clement and Marc Rius and War Is Over! Inspired By The Music Of John and Yoko by Dave Mullins and Brad Booker. The latter film is also nominated for Best Short at the Annie Awards. Pacyderme was previously nominated for best short at the Annecy and Zagreb festivals. Two of the films come from France, one is an Israeli co-production, one comes from Iran and the remaining two come from the United States.
The nominees for Best Visual Effects go to The Creator, Godzilla Minus One, Guardians Of The Galaxy Volume 3, Mission Impossible- Dead Reckoning Part One and Napoleon.
Neither Spider-Man nor The Boy and the Heron have repeated their Golden Globe feat of picking up second nominations for their score. Some even hoped that either of them might even be nominated for Best Picture, but alas it was not to be.
The 96th Academy Awards will be held on Sunday, March 10, 2024.