The consensus is in among movie critics: Ratatouille was robbed of a Best Picture nomination.
Despite making over $600 million worldwide and drawing more critical acclaim than any of the Best Picture nominees (No Country for Old Men, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, Juno, and Atonement), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences didn't add it to the list of Best Picture nominees.
Instead, the Brad Bird film was relegated to the Best Animated Feature Film category at the 80th Academy Awards.
Ratatouille Rated Higher Than Pulp Fiction
Associated Press entertainment writer Jake Coyle said that Ratatouille "has garnered an aggregate score of 96 on Metacritic.com, ranking it above Pulp Fiction, let alone this year's best picture candidates."
At least 23 news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail, L.A. Weekly and the New York Times, placed Ratatouille in their Top Ten Films of 2007 lists. Gene Seymour of Newsday and Michael Sragow of the Baltimore Sun, along with review compilation site Rotten Tomatoes, called it the best film of 2007, hands down.
Über critic Roger Ebert called Ratatouille "a triumph of animation, comedy, imagination and, yes, humanity."
Coyleit said that, despite the critical loving, the flick "was never a serious contender for best picture."
New York Times critic A.O. Scott also believes that Ratatouille should have been nominated for Best Picture. In his initial review, Scott called it "a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film." Interestingly, he didn't use the word 'animation' anywhere near that sentence.
"Its five nominations rank as the most ever for a computer animated film," continues Coyle, "and rate second among all animated films, only surpassed by the six received by Disney's Beauty and the Beast."
The Disney/Pixar flick also received nominations for Best Original Screenplay, Best Score, Best Sound Mixing and Best Editing. According to Coyle, this "suggests the kind of broad consensus that often results in bigger awards like best director or best picture."
So why didn't Ratatouille get a Best Picture nomination?
AMPAS Doesn't Want an Animated Film as Best Picture
This snub confirms what animation professionals have suspected for years: that the Best Animated Feature Film category was deliberately designed to keep an animated flick from ever taking Best Picture honours. The category was announced after Disney's Beauty and the Beast became a long-shot nominee for Best Picture back in 1992. Ten years later, AMPAS handed out the first Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film (to DreamWorks Animation's Shrek), and toons were shut out ever since.
"Is this a case where (Ratatouille is) penalized and ghettoized because there's a separate category for animated fare?" asked Tom O'Neill of the Los Angeles Times. "It seems to have the same respect in the industry and among film critics as Beauty and the Beast."
Ratatouille producer Brad Lewis makes it plain that he bears AMPAS no ill-will, and is excited that the flick got nominated in some many diverse categories. But his frustration with the 'ghettoization' of animated films is evident.
"Ultimately, (the category) makes it perhaps too convenient for people to look at an animated film from an isolated perspective," said Lewis to AP. "Somebody can say, `You know what? We have a place for that, so we don't necessarily have to give it broader consideration.'"
Best Original Screenplay: The Real Best Picture Category
Most tellingly, Ratatouille was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, along with Juno, Michael Clayton, Lars and the Real Girl and The Savages. Veteran Oscar watchers will say that the Best Original Screenplay category is truly where the action is, since the winner of that award is usually the movie that the Academy wishes they could give the Best Picture Oscar to.
Just look at previous winners: acclaimed movies such as Little Miss Sunshine, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Citizen Kane and The Usual Suspects that were just too weird for AMPAS.
Little wonder that in 1994, when Quentin Tarantino won the award for his Pulp Fiction script, he presciently said "This will be the only time I'm gonna be up here." He was right: Forrest Gump won Best Picture that year.
If Ratatouille wins Best Original Screenplay (a long shot, since Diablo Cody's script for Juno is getting massive lovin' these days), then it's an admission by AMPAS that the fix is in. An animated film will never, ever receive the big award from Oscar, no matter how good it is.
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