Two years ago, we tripped ourselves up trying to figure out if non-Oscar-nominated The Lego Movie winning the BAFTA over Big Hero 6 was more or less telling than How to Train Your Dragon 2 failing to even get a nomination from the Brits. We put our chips on How to Train Your Dragon 2 and came up short, ignoring Oscar’s aversion to sequels and BAFTA’s especially good predictive value in determining this category’s winner. To date, no film has won the Oscar here without at least being nominated for the BAFTA award, which doesn’t bode well for My Life As a Zucchini and The Red Turtle.
So, what does it mean that Kubo and the Two Strings won the BAFTA over Zootopia? Maybe nothing more than Kubo and the Two Strings benefited from a vote split, as it went up against three Disney films. The tea leaves have been telling us that the Oscar is Zootopia’s to lose since pitchfork-wielding Rotten Tomatoes readers went after critics for daring to ruin the film’s perfect Tomatometer score. This critic could tell you that Zootopia’s aesthetic is blandly familiar and that its metaphor for cultural diversity is close to incoherent, but if you contributed to the film’s one-billion-dollar worldwide box-office cume, would you even listen? In the end, this aggressively woke cartoon’s message comes down to telling us that racism is bad. And that’s a winning hand in almost every category where La La Land isn’t nominated.
Will Win: Zootopia
Could Win: Kubo and the Two Strings
Should Win: My Life as a Zucchini
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