Pixar earned its second animated feature Oscar for THE INCREDIBLES at the 77th Annual Academy Awards, Feb. 27, 2005, while Skywalker Sound won the Best Sound Editing Award. Animated feature was the award up for the night, collected by a jubilant Brad Bird. He thanked the “holy trinity” at Pixar – referring to Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs and John Lasseter – for creating the greatest studio “on the face of the Earth,” Bird said. He also thanked the entire crew, the Disney marketing department and his family, saying, “Animation is about creating the illusion of life and you can’t create it if you don’t have one.”

Bird was soon pressed into service as a presenter, in a way, providing the voice of his designer character, Edna Mode (patterned after the Academy-award winning costume designer Edith Head). The 3D character magically appeared with co-presenter Pierce Bronson to present the award, appropriately enough, for best costume design. Brosnan was nearly without voice so Bird as Edie read the nominations and announced the winner.

Chris Landreth had to accept his award for Best Animated Short for RYAN from the seats, where some of the categories were awarded, as he was grouped with his fellow nominees. Nevertheless, he was thrilled and eloquently thanked his supporters from a microphone in the aisle and acknowledged his docu/animation subject, Ryan Larkin. "I am here tonight because of the grace and humility of one guy watching from Montreal. Ryan Larkin, I dedicate this award to you," said Landreth.

Randy Thom and Michael Silvers at Skywalker Sound won for sound editing on THE INCREDIBLES. They had won Golden Reels the previous night at the Motion Picture Sound Editors ceremony in the Animated Feature category. It was Thom’s first experience on an animated picture he told AWN. However, they won the Oscar in competition against live-action and animated features.

Sony Pictures is celebrating its win for Best Visual Effects for SPIDER-MAN 2, which John Dykstra, Scott Stokdyk, Anthony LaMolinara and John Frazier were able to accept on stage. Primary contributed houses were Sony Pictures Imageworks plus Zoic Studios, Radium Inc. and Barbed Wire. During his acceptance, Dykstra said, “Boy, am I glad there wasn’t a fourth episode of LORD OF THE RINGS,” figuring that would have taken the award as the previous installments had done.

Here are a few onstage/backstage comments:

Sound editor Thom on the differences between live action and animation: “I think there are fewer differences all the time because the films that we work on that are predominantly live action tend to have a lot of computer graphics and animated elements in them. Typically when you do the sound for an animated film, one of the things the director tells you is he doesn't want it to sound like an animated film. And that was certainly true about THE INCREDIBLES.

“Our goal was to make it sound like a live-action film. I mostly work in dialogue, and it is a fair difference for me, in that in the live action when you're cutting dialogue, you're dealing with production sound and trying to save as much of the production sound as you can. In animation, they start with the recordings that are clean, and most of my job is to work with making those – especially in THE INCREDIBLES – making the dialogue as believable as possible, by either replacing it – replacing it if we needed to or adjusting, synching whenever necessary.”