Despite the fact that it isn’t even Thanksgiving yet Hollywood is already getting itself ready for the 2011 Academy Awards. Walt Disney Studios chairman Rich Ross has announced that his company will be lobbying hard for their animated film Toy Story 3 to get first a nomination and then, hopefully, a win for the Best [...]
Despite the fact that it isn’t even Thanksgiving yet Hollywood is already getting itself ready for the 2011 Academy Awards. Walt Disney Studios chairman Rich Ross has announced that his company will be lobbying hard for their animated film Toy Story 3 to get first a nomination and then, hopefully, a win for the Best Picture Academy Award. Here is our first look at one of the trade magazine ad photos which attempts to inspire Academy Award members to nominate the film for Best Picture and Best Animated Feature:
“We’re going for the Best Picture win. We wanted to have the best movie and the reviews have clearly said that and it’s the number one box office hit of the year so I’m not sure why we would not go for it all,” the Walt Disney Studios Chairman Rich Ross told me in a phone conversation this week. He’s talking about their worldwide billion dollar grosser Toy Story 3 which also sits atop Rotten Tomatoes chart of the best reviewed films of the year, at least those in wide release. To that end Disney/Pixar will launch an ambitious advertising campaign aimed squarely at Academy members this week that will blatantly try to associate past Best Picture winners with TS3 by having Toy Story characters enact some iconic images from Oscar winning films like West Side Story, On The Waterfront, Shakespeare In Love, Silence Of The Lambs, Titanic, The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King and Forrest Gump … There are potentially more than 20 different ads they will create, but some, like Lambs, which features a disembodied Mr. Potato Head, still are being cleared by various parties. The campaign which uses the phrase ‘Not Since’ will launch with The Godfather Part II in which Lotso, the mob boss-like bear emulates Al Pacino … Of course TS3 is a presumed front runner for Best Animated Feature but a Best Pic win is a longer shot. Disney has had the only two nominees ever, 1991’s Beauty And The Beast before the separate ani category was established in 2001 and last year with Pixar’s Up, the first time there were ten nominees instead of five since 1943. Neither won and Disney is the only major never to have won the Best Picture Oscar, period … “The theory is pretty simple for us,” says Ross. “It’s thrilling that there is a separate category for animation and that allows animated movies to be recognized but for some reason an animated film has never gotten Best Picture and I always wondered was there not an appetite? We decided this year we have the biggest and best reviewed film of the year. If not this year, and not this movie, when?” … With this movie we wanted to come up with a campaign that kept our aspirations clear but at the same time used a tongue in cheek approach,” he says. “It’s all to recognize the quandary which is that no animated picture had won Best Picture, so we used only Best Picture images to reflect that. I feel very confident we have a movie everybody loves and I want to make sure with our support and our campaign that people don’t feel the consolation prize is the appropriate prize for a movie like Toy Story 3. I think people will look at the ads and feel it’s very Pixar and very Disney. At the same time it’s very clear. Toy Story 3 is a Best Picture. Vote for it. Please.”
I absolutely agree, if Toy Story 3 doesn’t at least get the Best Picture nomination (and hopefully the win) then what will it take for an animated film to win? TS3 is, hands down, one of the best films of the year. In my mind, only The Social Network is worthy enough to possibly beat it as the Best Picture. I think the difficulty for Toy Story 3 is that it came out so many months ago … people may have already forgotten what a fantastic film it is. After the jump, check out one more promo photo for Disney‘s new Best Picture campaign for Toy Story 3 …
I love both of these ads and I think it is very smart for Disney to associate their film with iconic Best Picture winning films of the past. It remains to be seen if this promo campaign will be fruitful but I hope it is. Toy Story 3 is such a fantastic film … IMHO, it is absolutely worthy to be named the Best Picture of the year. What do YOU think?
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Olivia Wilde
Megan Fox
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