While “Kubo and the Two Strings” won the BAFTA award for Best Animated Feature, to the surprise of many of our Oscar experts, does that mean anything at the Academy Awards? How reliable is BAFTA when it comes to predicting the Oscar winner for Best Animated Feature?
Below, I’ve compiled a chart of the last 10 years to see how well three individual awards groups (BAFTA, Golden Globes and Annie Awards) did at correlating with the Academy Awards. I’ve listed the winners under each awards group – if the film is highlighted in green, it matches the academy’s choice. If it’s in red, they disagreed and chose another.
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Surprisingly, BAFTA has the best track record at predicting Best Animated Feature winners, only getting it wrong once in the last decade. The Golden Globes are hit and miss with seven correct and three wrong, while the Annie Awards (who most would think would be the best at predicting Best Animated Feature Oscar winners) has the poorest batting average at .500.
Indeed, the Annie Awards have three times been the sole awards group to go against the grain while BAFTA has never been outsmarted by the other two. In the one instance when BAFTA was wrong, so were the other two precursors.
“Zootopia” won both the Golden Globe and the Annie Award for Best Animated Feature, yet lost the BAFTA to “Kubo.” This divide happened two years ago, when “How to Train Your Dragon 2” claimed both those awards but BAFTA gave their prize to “The Lego Movie.” However, both of those movies were snubbed by the academy, which awarded the Oscar to “Big Hero 6.”
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In 2015, the winners of the Oscar, the BAFTA and Globe & Annie came from three different film studios: Disney,Warner Animation and DreamWorks respectively. This year, however, it’s a competition between two studios: Laika with “Kubo and the Two Strings,” which has odds of 16/1 and Disney with both the frontrunner “Zootopia” (1/10 odds) and “Moana” (40/1 odds).
Of the two Disney nominees, “Zootopia” is the more financially and critically successful and has already won two major awards. It is doubtful that voters would switch from that Disney toon to another from the mouse house. Rather, it’s much more likely they’d jump ship to a completely different studio, a completely different film and a completely different style of filmmaking, all of which is represented by “Kubo and the Two Strings.”
This is Laika’s fourth feature film; all three previous pictures reaped Best Animated Feature bids. As it has yet to prevail, voters may feel it’s time to reward these talented stop-motion artists. After all, two of the last four Animated Feature Oscars went to Disney, the other pair to it’s sister company, Pixar.
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