Family Guy creator and next month’s Academy Award host Seth MacFarlane and actress Emma Stone announced the nominees for this year’s Oscars at 5 a.m. this morning. (January 10) in Beverly Hills.
The nominees for Best Animated Feature are:
Brave (directed by Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman) Disney/Pixar
Frankenweenie (Tim Burton) Disney
The Pirates! Band of Misfits (Peter Lord) Sony/Aardman
ParaNorman (Sam Fell and Chris Butler) Focus/LAIKA
Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore) Disney
The big surprise in this category was the inclusion of Sony/Aardman’s The Pirates! Band of Misfits! and the exclusion of other earlier award season favorites such as DreamWorks’ Rise of the Guardians and GKIDS’ hand-drawn imports The Rabbi’s Cat, Zarafa and From Up on Poppy Hill. It was Disney that scored a home run with all three of its titles making the Oscar nom list this year. Also, it’s interesting to note that three of the five titles are stop-motion animated, while the other two are CG.
None of the animated features made the Best Picture nomination list, which has nine titles this year: Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty.
In the Animated shorts category, the five nominees are:
Adam and Dog. Minkyu Lee, director (Lodge Films)
Fresh Guacamole. PES, director (PES)
Head over Heels. Timothy Reckart, director; Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly, producer (National Film and Television School)
Maggie Simpson in “The Longest Daycare.” David Silverman, director (Gracie Films)
Paperman. John Kahrs, director (Disney Animation Studios)
The five nominees in the Visual Effects category are:
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Joe Letteri, Eric Saindon, David Clayton and R. Christopher White)
Life of Pi (Bill Westenhofer, Guillaume Rocheron, Erik-Jan De Boer and Donald R. Elliott )
Marvel’s The Avengers (Janek Sirrs, Jeff White, Guy Williams and Dan Sudick)
Prometheus (Richard Stammers, Trevor Wood, Charley Henley and Martin Hill)
Snow White and the Huntsman (Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, Philip Brennan, Neil Corbould and Michael Dawson)
MacFarlane also picked up an Oscar nomination for “Everybody Needs a Best Friend,” the song he wrote for his movie Ted (Music by Walter Murphy).
The winners will be announced at the 85th annual Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday, February 24, 2012, at the Kodak Theatre televised live on ABC.
You can check out the complete list of nominees at www.oscars.com.
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