Jan 24, 2023

Academy Announces 2023 Animation and VFX Oscar Nominees

Nominations for the 95th Academy Awards were announced today.

The animated feature category for 2023 has seemed almost like a formality over the past few months. This is because it had long been assumed by awards pundits and forecasters that four of the currently nominated films would surely make the cut: Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, directed by del Toro and Mark Gustafson; Dommie See's Turning Red, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, directed by Dean Fleischer Camp; and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, directed by Joel Crawford. However, fifth place was ultimately won by Chris Williams' "The Sea Beast," after much debate and speculation.

Pinocchio was nominated for Score, Music, and Production Design by several other major awards bodies, but the Academy Awards chose it only in the Animated Feature category.

The animated short film category was a more difficult field to predict prior to today's announcement. Perhaps the only previous Oscar nominee in this category, Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby's "The Flying Sailor," seemed likely to be nominated, but at the time the nominees were announced, the category was awash with recent Most of the major commercialized studio films were not.

Nevertheless, three of the five films selected from the 15 nominees were from The Walt Disney Company (Sarah Gunnarsdottir and Pamela Ribbon's My Year of Dicks), Apple TV+ (Charlie Mackesy and Matthew Freud's The Boy, the the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse), and the National Film Board of Canada ("The Flying Sailor"), among other major media outlets.

Filling out the animated short film category were João Gonzalez's Portuguese film Ice Merchants, which screened at Cannes, and Australian Lachlan Pendragon's An Ostrich Told Me the World, which won the Student Academy Award Is Fake and I Think I Believe It".

The visual effects category seems almost academic this year, as "Avatar: The Way of Water" looks absolutely certain to win an Oscar. Avatar: The Way of Water is such a CG-heavy film that it probably could have been nominated as an animated feature. Other nominees in the same category include "No Western Frontier", "Batman", "Black Panther", "Wakanda Forever", and "Top Gun": Maverick.

The following are the Oscar categories in which animation was nominated:

The 95th Academy Awards will be held on Sunday, March 12 at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, California.