2019 Academy Awards: ‘Spider-Verse,’ ‘Bao’ ‘First Man’ Win Oscars
Sony Pictures Animation’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won the Oscar for best animated feature, capping an extraordinary award season run in which it won nearly every major animation award.
Spider-Verse marks the first time that a non-Walt Disney Company has won the award in this category since Rango in 2012. Prior to tonight’s win, the Walt Disney Company had won the award for 10 out of the last 11 years.
The award was accepted onstage by producer Phil Lord and Chris Miller and directors Peter Ramsey, Bob Persichetti, and Rodney Rothman. Ramsey becomes the first African-American director to win the feature animation Oscar in the 18-year history of the category.
It is the first Oscar win in the Animated Feature category for both Culver City, California-based Sony Pictures Animation and its sister production studio, Sony Pictures Imageworks, which has locations in Culver City and Vancouver, Canada. Below is a video of the studio in Vancouver, where crew gathered tonight to watch the Oscar ceremony:
Inside @imageworksvfx when #SpiderVerse won Best Animated Feature the #Oscars !!!
Wow!!! So honored, & still can't believe I was a part of this amazing project! Congrats to the whole team and thank you to everyone who went to watch it! ❤️❤️❤️ pic.twitter.com/saEXa9RSQA
— Nick Kondo 近藤 (@NickTyson) February 25, 2019
The other animated feature nominees were Incredibles 2, Isle of Dogs, Mirai, and Ralph Breaks the Internet.
In the Animated Short category, the Pixar short Bao, directed by Domee Shi, won the Oscar. The other nominees in the category were Late Afternoon, Weekends, Animal Behaviour, and One Small Step.
The award is Pixar’s fifth Oscar in the animated short category, and the studio’s second win in three years.
It’s also the first win for a women filmmaker in the category in over a decade. The last time a women director won was Suzie Templeton in 2008 for her stop-motion film Peter and the Wolf.
In the Visual Effects category, First Man won the Oscar. The award was accepted by Paul Lambert, Ian Hunter, Tristan Myles, and J. D. Schwalm.
The other nominees in the category were Avengers: Infinity War, Christopher Robin, Ready Player One, and Solo: A Star Wars Story.