> Howl's Moving Castle in the Best Animated Feature category is the most welcome surprise...

I thought Howl's was a sure bet, just based on Miyazaki's past work. The surprise for me was that only a sixth of the people taking place in the nominations game voted for it. I was also plesantly surprised to see a lack of CGI-driven works in the list. There seems to be something more honest (or at least deserving of praise) about creating a work through a labor-intensive process than creating a work sitting at a computer, and letting it generate the movie, no matter how labor-intensive that actually is. I suppose that's a matter of perception -- someone drawing each frame of a movie or creating a stop motion film a frame at a time appears to take more effort than someone telling a computer to digitally walk from point A to point B; instead of the people creating the film, the computer does.

> "Star Wars" ousted from the Sound and Visual Effects categories by Narnia? Come on!! Narnia was a good film, but it was not technically innovative -- and it shouldn't be showing up anywhere near the Makeup category, which is where Star Wars scored its lone nomination.

I was pulling for Serenity and Sin City in the Visual Effects categories. Back to computer graphics, what Zoic Studios did in Serenity was amazing. Two shots stand out for me in that movie. The first one is near the end, where a spaceship is tumbling through the atmosphere. Although completely digital, the shot was staged as if there was an actual cameraman following the ship through the sky, zoomed in too tightly, desperately trying to keep the ship in the shot. The other shot was at the very end, when a ship lifted off the ground in the middle of a storm. Again, keeping with the documentary style, the virtual cameraman tilts the camera up to track the ship. There, not very noticable on the first viewing, raindrops hit the camera lens, as if the camera and film crew actually existed. All this on a movie that had at least a third of the budget than the actual nominees in that category.

But Sin City... How could they have overlooked Sin City?

-FP