How did Oscar-nominated ‘Boss Baby’ become awards season’s running joke?
IT BECAME such an immediate punchline on Tuesday, even Rotten Tomatoes trolled the Academy Awards’ nomination of “The Boss Baby.”
“The Academy: “We’ve nominated your favourite films from last year including Get Out, Lady Bird, The Shape of Water, and ... The Boss Baby,” tweeted the pop-culture review aggregation site.
Yes, yet again, “The Boss Baby” has somehow become a common punching bag for disgruntled awards watchers. The animated Fox film may have been highly popular at the box office — it grossed nearly a half-billion dollars worldwide, spawning plans for a 2021 sequel — but in “Boss Baby,” many fans see everything that’s wrong with Hollywood politics.
Or, in some cases, they’re just big fans of “The Lego Batman Movie,” which was snubbed on Tuesday, just as it was when the 2018 Golden Globes nominations were announced last month, spawning reddit threads and a spasm of social-media mockery.
So just how did “The Boss Baby” become a target of so much ire and satire?
Well, first, it’s hard to fault any of the four other animated feature nominees. Among the Hollywood entries, “Coco” was heartily embraced by many and sports the cherished Pixar pedigree, and Fox/Blue Sky’s “Ferdinand” got a respectable reception (scoring a solid if unremarkable 70 per cent “fresh” among reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes). Meanwhile, both European entries, GKIDS/Cartoon Saloon’s “The Breadwinner” and Good Deed’s “Loving Vincent,” are viewed as painstakingly handcrafted, prestige labours of lower-budget love.
Razzie Award
So if your favourite animated film didn’t make the cut with the Oscars or the Globes, “The Boss Baby” — which scored just 52 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, among critics and audiences alike — is the weakest link in the bunch to target. ( For comparison’s sake, “Coco,” “Breadwinner” and “Loving Vincent” all scored about “80” on Rotten Tomatoes among both critics and civilians.)
To be sure, “Boss Baby” — which stars previous Oscar nominee Alec Baldwin as the title voice — is no “The Emoji Movie,” which scored a dreadful 9 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes and on Monday received four Razzie Award nominations (a record for an animated film ).
Really, much of the ongoing derision aimed at “Boss Baby” can be tracked back to which films are most being slighted— at least according to their fans.
When the Golden Globes nominations were announced in December, the biggest snub was widely considered to be the rollicking “The Lego Batman Movie,” which — with Will Arnett voicing the plastic- caped Crusader — some viewers judged to be among the best Batman incarnations yet. The movie even scored a 91 per cent “fresh” among critics.
But the catch is: Why would the Academy suddenly begin showing love to the Lego franchise now? The arguably superior kickoff film in the franchise, 2014’s “The Lego Movie,” didn’t receive an Oscars animated-feature nomination either (its sole Oscar nod was for best song). The Academy Awards, as a voting body, clearly aren’t the biggest fans of Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who directed the first entry and stayed on as producers of the sequel.
But this year’s Oscars crop also excludes such submitted contenders as Japan’s “A Silent Voice” and “In This Corner of the World,” Dash Shaw’s “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea” and the London- sprung “Ethel and Ernest,” as well as such bigger Hollywood fare as “Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie” ( 86 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), Pixar’s “Cars 3” and Illumination’s “Despicable Me 3.”
For animation, the Academy traditionally nominates a blend of handcrafted and CGI movies, as well as a mix of American and foreign films. In 2018, the four most lauded Oscar animation nominees reflected that trend nicely. Meanwhile, “The Boss Baby” nabbed a slot that could easily have gone to one of a handful of other eligible films.
And some years, in truth, there are only three or four fairly exceptional contenders. The rest is the odd mix of politics, random perception and the quirky luck of the awards draw.
So the intriguing question come the Mar 4 Academy Awards broadcast becomes: Will Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel, who voices the father character in “The Boss Baby,” join in the running joke?