BAFTA Nominations 2014

The big "Monsters University" football game.

Many consider the BAFTA awards the second-most prestigious film awards of the season, even above the Golden Globes. The Golden Globes get more press because they are the first awards of the year, are in Hollywood, and are considered fairly good predictors of what will happen at the Academy Awards.

The three nominees for the 2014 BAFTA Awards in the animated feature category are Illumination Entertainment’s Despicable Me 2, Disney’s Frozen, and Pixar’s Monsters University. Frozen and Despicable Me 2 appear to be the favorites this awards season, with other choices shuttling into the third spot. Since "Monsters University" wasn't nominated for an Academy Award, its people would dearly love to get at least a BAFTA. Since Pixar doesn't have any releases scheduled for 2014, this will be the last chance for the studio to pick up a major award any time soon.

It's only natural that conspiracy theories start now, because that's how people are. This BAFTA nomination sort of legitimizes "Monsters University" as a top film, so why no Oscar nod? The thinking is that Disney wants its own "Frozen" to win everything, and so did not push Pixar's competing "Monsters University" for the Academy Award. It's tough to get a nomination - it's worth money at the box office and in DVD sales - so it wouldn't take much to slight a film that Disney didn't really have its heart in having as a fellow nominee. I'm just throwing that out there, wrong as the theory may be.

To be honest, I think that "Frozen" is simply the better film, Disney's best in years and years. But everyone will have their own ideas about that, and they are just as legitimate as anyone else's.

In the animated short category, the BAFTA nominees are Everything I Can See From Here (Bjorn-Erik Aschim, Sam Taylor, and Friederike Nicolaus), I Am Tom Moody (Ainslie Henderson, who also won a BAFTA last year for co-writing Will Anderson’s short The Making of Longbird) and Sleeping With The Fishes (Yousif Al-Khalifa, James Walker, and Sarah Woolner). Short-film nominees, unlike the feature film nominees, must have some British content.

The Making of Longbird from Will Anderson on Vimeo.
2020