“I don't know of any film that can't be sold by 30 seconds of footage,” Diamond said, urging those eager to promote their work to cut a trailer in keeping with Academy (and certain larger festival) regulations. “The tools are there, use them. It's not about the Oscar, it's about exposing your work. You should profit off of your films, build e-mail lists, let people get excited, let them get inspired. Why give it all away?”

* The Student Academy Awards are entirely different story, with their own set of qualifying rules, and a tiered system of local and regional competition rounds before the medal nominees can be decided upon.

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Zoe Chevat is a Los Angeles-based animator, graphic artist, sculptor, and author of both academic and fictional work. Originally from northern New Jersey, she graduated from Bennington College and is currently an MFA candidate in Experimental Animation at CalArts. She has worked on music videos and shorts for AfterEd TV, UnBroiled Inc., and Ariel Hart/DeMille Productions, as well as the anthological Today's Forecast, which debuted at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage, Oberhausen, Germany. A proud cinephile, she has been blogging about gender and film/video media for female geek-oriented newsblog The Mary Sue, and has been a recurring guest on a new podcast series for Anime News Network, entitled "Chicks on Anime."

Most of her critical writing is concerned with the portrayal of sexuality and gender in genre work, with a particular focus on trope subversion for fun and profit. She provides a ground-level insider's view on the new generation of animation fans and creators, with an eye to negotiating that tricky space between high and low art…or at least to rattling some cages along the way. For more rants, spewings, and inky scribbles, follow her AWN blog Off-Model as well as her website at http://www.zoechevat.com.