Welcome, Pixar fans everywhere! Today is February 22nd, 2009, and you know what that means: it’s the long awaited Academy Awards, the biggest movie event of the year.
Let’s recap, Pixar was nominated 7 times this year, 6 for WALL•E and 1 for Presto! Here’s a list of the Pixar specific nominations.
The awards season culminates on this one event, and now it’s the moment of truth. Good luck Andrew Stanton and company!
Note: When Pixar wins an award, is mentioned or featured, it will be posted below in real time.
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Awards Count: 1
Winner: Here are the Pixar winners from tonight’s awards.
Best Animated Feature Film of the Year: WALL•E (Andrew Stanton)
Congratulations.
Passed: Only nominated.
Best Original Screenplay: WALL•E (Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Pete Docter)
Best Animated Short Film: Presto (Doug Sweetland)
Best Sound Editing: WALL•E (Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood)
Best Sound Mixing: WALL•E (Tom Myers, Michael Semanick and Ben Burtt)
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score): WALL•E (Thomas Newman)
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song): WALL•E (Peter Gabriel, Thomas Newman)
Chatter: What’s happening on the red carpet and at the awards? All times are EST.
7:40– Peter Gabriel, nominated for Best Song (Down to Earth) just showed up on the red carpet and talked to E!. This begs the question, since he isn’t performing, who is?
7:50– A quick shot of John Lasseter and co. on TV Guide, awaiting an interview…
8:00– Official red carpet coverage is now on LIVE on ABC.
8:25– Michael Giacchino, composer of The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Up, and of the 2009 Oscars, was featured in clips from an interview with designers and planners of the show.
8:30– Ceremony starts hosted by Hugh Jackman.
8:55– An excerpt of Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon and Pete Docter‘s screenplay for WALL•E was shown for original Screenplay, it was the lighter shot. Milk won.
9:00– An awesome montage featuring our favorite little robot chronicled the top animated movies today featuring Bolt, Kung Fu Panda, Horton Hears A Who, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Space Chimps and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.
9:05– In some funny news, Jack Black (presenter of Best Animated) told us how he makes money. He voices a role in a DreamWorks movie and bets all that money at the Oscars for a Pixar movie, the audience including Jeffrey Katzenberg laughed!
9:10– WINNER! Although WALL•E threw away the Oscar over a video tape in the video, it was that film that took home the award. Andrew Stanton got up and accepted thanking Jim Morris, Lindsey Collins, John Lasseter, Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs among others.
9:25- A montage of romance in movies of 2008 featured WALL•E prominently with 4 clips chronicling WALL•E and EVE‘s love story! "Evah", "Waaaaall-e"
9:40– Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull was featured in the Sci-Tech Awards recap. Jessica Biel called it like it is, Catmull is the god of CGI! The camera focused in on him hearing the praise two times. He really deserves the nod considering he pioneered CGI, and where we would we be if he hadn’t?
10:30– WALL•E clips are shown during the Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing nomination roll call. The Dark Knight and Slumdog Millionaire win respectively. I don’t get it, WALL•E was supported by sound, but oh well…
10:40– Define Dancing played on top of the montage for legendary actor Jerry Lewis.
10:50– Composer and Pixar regular, Michael Giacchino directed tracks from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Defiance, Milk, Slumdog Millinaire and WALL•E. Specifically WALL•E’s Define Dancing. A.R. Rahman won for Slumdog.
11:00– John Legend takes the stage with the Soweto Gospel Choir in place of Peter Gabriel to sing Down to Earth among A.R. Rahman in a medley of Slumdog Millionaire and WALL•E songs. Jai Ho from Slumdog won. On a better note, John Legend did a pretty great job on Down to Earth.
That’s it for the Pixar awards. The Best Picture award winner is Slumdog Millionaire!
But there’s more Pixar at the Oscars…
11:55– They played a short clip of Up during the credits (where Pixar was mentioned numerous times) in a montage of upcoming 2009 films.
12:00– In the final disclaimer, they played a track from Ratatouille, End Creditouilles by Michael Giacchino.
The end– Pixar was VERY well represented this year!
My thoughts: Congratulations to all the winners, especially Andrew Stanton on his second Academy Award and this extremely successful awards season!! Also, I wish to congratulate all of the Pixar nominees: for WALL•E Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Pete Docter, Ben Burtt, Tom Myers, Mathew Wood, Michael Semanick, composer Thomas Newman, singer/songwriter Peter Gabriel, for Presto Doug Sweetland, and of course everyone who made these films possible! Congratulate the winners and let us know how you feel in the comments section below.
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Don’t forget: It was announced that during the Oscars telecast a trailer for Pixar’s next movie Up will run, so keep your eyes peeled for that! Details here.
Sounds like Disney decided to play a trailer for the Touchstone film The Proposal starring Sandra Bullock. It’s quite disappointing that they changed their mind about an Up trailer, unless it was misreported, at least they played a short clip from the movie during the end credits of the awards show.
Where to watch on TV: The 81st Annual Academy Awards will play today (2/22/09) on ABC, live from the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, California, starting at 8 PM EST/5 PM PST.
For international viewers, please check your local listings.
Keep it here for chatter about red carpet appearances as well as my opinion on Pixar and other awards!
Readers, feel free to comment on anything interesting going on during the telecast or to predict and congratulate the winners!
Will watch it from German TV channel ProSieben. 🙂
Will be watching on Film1 (Dutch movie-channel). Good luck to Mr. Stanton and all the rest of the Pixar-crew!
If you live in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Lichtenstein or the other, german-speaking countries zapp to Pro7 @ 02:00am CET for live-Oscar-broadcast.
I’m gonna cross my fingers for either 6 for WALL-E or 7 for Pixar. Sadly I think it may be more likely that we get 2 for WALL-E, maybe 3 for Pixar. I’ll be happy if we stick to just Screenplay and Animated, though, those are the only interesting awards tonight anyway (since Gabriel is protesting The Oscars stupid decision-making).
Well, whatever WALL•E gets, we should be happy that it was recognized in the first place.
I’m betting on Animated and Screenplay, maybe song, and maybe sound.
And then Presto could win, maybe Oktapodi will, what do you guys think?
I’m recording it on the TV (Foxtel has it live for all subscribers on Movie Extra) as well as watching it streamed over the ‘net (hopefully).
I would love for Pixar to win Best Score and for Ben Burtt to get something. Oh, and for Presto to win.
Exciting!!!
It won Best Animated Feature! Wooooo!
Did you all hear Jack Black’s joke about betting on Pixar? =D
Yes, Jack Black Rocks!!!! Go Wall-E!!!
Jack Black was AWESOME.
Hooray Wall-E 😀
Congratulations, WALL•E!!
Although it was more or less a safe bet, after the 2006 fiasco with Cars I must admit I was a little bit nervous. Phew! Congratulations to everyone at Pixar and especially Andrew Stanton with his second Academy Award!
Congratulations to our metal little friend for making it to the big show!!!
That is the way to beat Dreamworks!!
Now go for everything else!!!
Good to see WALL•E represented in the Romance 2008 segment. Awww. <3
The very end of Lovers in Japan (Or the romance segment!) was in the least, very very cute.
Congrats Ed Catmull! That was neat.
Congratulations on the nominations anyway, Ben Burtt. D=
There’s still Best Song left, let’s cross our fingers!!
Only 1 win. Abysmal and stupid nonsense.
To be honest, I find it almost unbelievable Slumdog Millionaire won the Oscar for Sound Mixing, Score AND Song! What the heck?!
“To be honest, I find it almost unbelievable Slumdog Millionaire won the Oscar for Sound Mixing, Score AND Song! What the heck?!”
Didn’t you hear? They renamed them The Slumdog Awards in their honor!
I’m more unbelieving about The Dark Knight winning ANYTHING sound related. Apparently good sound means not being able to hear the characters over the loud obnoxious music and explosions!
I agree Mark! How could it have won Sound mixing and song and score? I have seen the movie and the audio doesn’t even compare to WALL-E!
All these awards make me so mad.
At least it won Best Animated, we should be happy!
I know it was kind of weird for Slumdog to get Best Sound, but that’s the Academy for ya!
“Computer, define ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. Slumdog Millionaire, a motion picture that won too many Oscars in 2009.”
I can’t believe Slumdog Millionaire swept more Academy Awards than Schindler’s List, but I guess some congratulations are in order…
At least, as martini833 said, WALL-E won the Oscar for best Animated Feature Film.
This was simply one of the best Oscars I’ve ever seen. I was rooting for both Slumdog Millionaire and WALL-E, and they both won big!
I’ve heard a lot of complaints about Slumdog’s many wins. I’m most disappointed in WALL-E not winning original screenplay; this was the Academy’s time to show Pixar deserves to the win for screenplay, but I guess winner Milk did have a story worthy of today’s times.
I especially laughed at Black’s comment on working for Dreamworks but betting all of his money on Pixar. So true.
Check out Andrew Stanton backstage with Jack Black and Jennifer Aniston after receiving his Oscar:
http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/496e682876b273c0/49a280338ffa8979/496e682876b273c0/44a42682/-cpid/7952673b6f4a925f
Woooah ho ho! Man, the Oscars certainly were rigged big time this year! Everyone knows that it’s all a predetermined set-up, of course, but I think they overdid themselves this time….
Well, first of all, I would like to give a heartfelt congratulations to Andrew Stanton and the entire crew at Pixar Animation Studios for breathing life into a solitary robot… and receiving the Academy Award for “Best Animated Feature Film”!! You guys deserve nothing less!
I was actually still rooting for “Kung Fu Panda”, but, after “WALL•E” was very unceremoniously overlooked in every other department it was nominated in, I’m glad that it won the “Best Animated Feature” award over “Panda”.
That said, I remain firm in my opinion that the last “decent” Academy Awards ceremony was in 2004, I believe, when Billy Crystal hosted the show. Now-a-days, I find everything to be politically-biased, extremely one-sided/opinionated, and (at times) environmentally friendly. I mean, come on, “Slumdog Millionaire” won for “Best Sound Mixing”, “Best Original Score”, and “Best Song”?! What the heck?!? They were waaay too biased this year. Almost every freakin’ award went to India, and if it didn’t go overseas it went to “Benjamin Button” for “Best Visual Effects”. (Uh-huh. Yeah, right. It won “Best Visual Effects” over “The Dark Knight” and “Iron Man”.) What really blew me away is the fact that Ben Burtt didn’t win anything, and neither did Thomas Newman. They deserved those awards more than anyone else, and we all know it. (It was nothing less than painful to watch the Oscars’ “updated” version of “Down to Earth” in place of Peter Gabriel.) And, by the way, Hugh Jackman’s performance kinda sucked. Every year they have to capitalize on lame jokes and over-played performances. Oh well. Thank goodness for such insertions as Jack Black’s reference to Pixar and that whole “Screenwriting” bit….
Thank GOD Heath Ledger won for “Best Supporting Actor”. Thank the Lord….
But I rant. Well, in any case, congratulations to Pixar!!
Sorry to see Slumdog Millionaire won. Sad to see Dark Knight didn’t get a best picture nom. Super happy to see Heath Ledger win. Thought Wall-E was an uneven picture. I really had my doubts it would win the best animated pic award. Kung Fu Panda was more children friendly I felt and less a political statement. Oh well. Here’s hoping UP restores my confidence in Pixar films.
Mike Thompson
Ok! This has gotten WAY out of hand. I’ve deleted the fighting but kept the opinion that started it. This type of posting is NOT allowed here on Pixar Planet/Upcoming Pixar.
To the first Anonymous: You do realize you’re on Upcoming PIXAR, so your comments might not be taken as well if they are extremely negative toward the studio’s film(s).
To the second Anonymous: Please refrain from fighting, if you disagree with another person’s comments, please do so in a kind and respectful way.
Anyways, I’m glad WALL•E won the Oscar.
That is all. End of discussion.
To accentuate martini‘s statement:
We here at Pixar Planet welcome expression of personal opinion and deep discussion, but there is a limit. Heated debate and any other comments pertaining to this type of behavior is strictly prohibited on this particular website, and discussions of an insolent nature will be dealt with swiftly. If anyone wishes to engage in/begin heated conversations, please do so privately. Thank you.