The Lost Thing, which is up for Best Animated Short at this month’s 83rd Annual Academy Awards, is now online. The 15-minute short was directed by Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan and it focuses on “a boy discovers a bizarre looking creature while out collecting bottle tops at the beach.” It was produced by Passion Pictures Australia and Screen Australia.

Over at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Blvd, I met up with 3 of the clever people behind the Oscar-winning film Logorama yesterday – (inset: left to right) co-director Hervé de Crécy, producer Nicolas Schmerkin and co-director Francois Alaux. They all had a look in their eyes that I think only Oscar winners get, and I heard quick mentions of partying with Madonna the night before and an upcoming CNN interview – all while their cell phones endlessly rang.

Next up for Autour de Minuit founder Schmerkin is a series of CG/live-action shorts called Babioles. I’ve seen the first episode, and it’s wonderful. Here’s a teaser from the project, which is being directed by Matray:

Surprising almost noone, Up took home the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film last night. In this clip below, director Pete Docter offers advice on how to get your own Oscar – “draw, draw, draw.” He also touches on the collaborative nature of his fellow Pixar directors like John Lasseter and Brad Bird. Big congrats to the whole team at Pixar, and to François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain, the three directors of Logorama, which won the Best Animated Short prize.

This Sunday’s telecast of the 82nd Academy Awards will present 5 nominees for the Best Animated Feature Film prize. Only once (2002) in the storied 9-year history of this award have more than 3 films been given the nod, presumably because animators eat so much at the post-awards buffet. We ask you, who better to break down the race for Oscar gold than comedy writer Geoffrey Golden? In this rainbow-flavored infographic below, Golden offers his take on the nominated films and their chances of taking home the sword-wielding statue named after Sesame Street’s homeless pack rat, Oscar the Grouch (EDITOR: fact check this before posting).
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With an Oscar nomination in hand, the team behind Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty dusted off ol’ Granny for a little gloating. Big congrats to the whole team at Brown Bag Films.

Today’s announcement of the Oscar nominations revealed 5 excellent shorts up for the Best Animated Short Film award.

French Roast , A Pumpkin Factory/Bibo Films Production, Fabrice O. Joubert
Trailer (full film here)

Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty (Brown Bag Films), A Brown Bag Films Production, Nicky Phelan and Darragh O’Connell
Full film:

Back in November, the Lineboil audience was nearly perfect in selecting the Oscar nominations, getting 4 or 5 correct. For Best Animated Feature Film, you chose Ponyo, as opposed to Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s stop-motion feature, which ended up snagging the nomination instead. Up stands out from the bunch, taking a total of 5 nominations, including Original Screenplay and a Best Picture nod. It’s only the second time an animated feature has been mentioned amongst the live-action films in this category (Beuaty and the Beast). Not to diminish this achievement, but BATB did it when only 5 films were nominated, while this year its 10. That said, I’d argue that if there were still 5 slots, Up would likely be amongst them. After all, it was the best-reviewed widely-released film of 2009, animated or not.

The other interesting development here is that a pair of 2D features (The Princess and the Frog and The Secret of Kells) were included. Only Persepolis (2007) and Howl’s Moving Castle (2005) had cracked this category in the past 5 years, while the onslaught of CG features basked in the limelight. Kells pulled off perhaps the biggest win by getting a nomination, as the film had such a small release in the US.

Here’s the nominations (5 this year, while previous years there were only 3):

• Coraline (Focus Features), Henry Selick
• Fantastic Mr. Fox (20th Century Fox), Wes Anderson
• The Princess and the Frog (Walt Disney), John Musker and Ron Clements
• The Secret of Kells (GKIDS), Tomm Moore
• Up (Disney/Pixar), Pete Docter

 
Congrats to all of the teams involved!