Several weeks ago, I went to the Academy screening of all the eligible animated shorts – about 30 films. It's held at the N.Y. Academy screening room (The Lighthouse) and is attended by all or most of the Academy members living in the Northeast area. Members even come down from Canada. It's one of my favorite events, because often I discover films I've never seen before and I always have a film that I'm trying to get nominated.
The first film on the 30 film program is a long one, 25 minutes, and not only that, but it's terrible! It's called “The American Dream”, it's one of those amateurish flash political agenda films, and it just got weirder and weirder. We came to find out that it was a Tea Party film about how the “rich Jews are creating the economic recession”.
There were some famous animators who entered their films, Don Hertzfeld, and Pritt Parn from Estonia, and Pixar and Disney of course,. But I felt my stiffest competition would be “Incident in Tower 37” and Kyle Bell's wonderful “The Mouse That Soared”.
In any case, they recently announced the short list, and thanks to the animation gods, my film, “The Cow Who Wanted to be a Hamburger” is selected! Yeah!! The other notables in the list of 10 finalists are Teddy Newton's “Day & Night”, Geefwee Boedoe's “Let's Pollute” (I met him in Annecy), and Andrew Ruhemann's “The Lost Thing.”
The main surprise was Don Hertzfeldt's wonderful “Wisdom Tooth” didn't make the list. It's very funny film and should have been included.
The next stage is we vote on all the shorts, docs, live action and animation – which takes place in early January – then on January 25th, we would see whether the Cow film has the right stuff. Be sure to pray to the animation gods.
Thanks,
Bill