I know perfectly well that the Acadamy looks down on animation. But why would you want it to be even worse of? Scrapping the Best Animated Feature category would give them even less recognition, with maybe a stellar Pixar getting a Best Picture nom every few years, while all the other great works not even getting a chance on a nomination anymore.
You must understand how important a nomination is for smaller, often foreign animated movies. An Oscar nomination puts it on the map, gets other project funded, viewers in the seats... My life as a Zuchini got a rerun where I live (Ghent, Belgium) around Oscar time in the arthouse cinema, and they even distributed the original language version too (almost all non-Disney animations only release dubbed in Flemish here, which is horrible, because they often are translated terribly too, as we don't have a dubbing culture for anything else than animation). And at the moment I am working with the Belgian production company that did the coproduction on Les Triplettes de Belleville and Brendan and the Secret of Kells. Those Oscar noms were priceless promotion for them and a opened a lot of doors...
This new rule can fuck it all up, and I really hope it doesn't so stuff like The Breadwinner can still get a nod. We'll see tuesday. But I'll take a very flawed award system over no award any time.
