In the land of not-Star Wars, Lucasfilm picked up a couple awards last weekend:
Red Tails won the NAACP Image award for Outstanding Motion Picture, beating out others such as Flight and Django Unchained. In a video clip from the event, George Lucas shares why he produced the WWII action film about the Tuskegee Airmen.
While the Annie Awards were dominated by wins for Wreck-It Ralph and Dragons: Riders of Berk, a team from Industrial Light and Magic won for Outstanding Achievement, Animated Effects in a Live Action Production: Jerome Platteaux, John Sigurdson, Ryan Hopkins, Raul Essig, and Mark Chataway won for their work on The Avengers. Also in the running, we had The Clone Wars crew with four nominations and LEGO Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Out with one nomination.
Not sure if I like that Red Tails award. The film was meh at best and giving it an award for “Outstanding Motion Picture” just doesn’t seem right. If they wanted to honor the fact that Lucas(film) dared to hand over a multi million dollar picture to a black guy telling a black story, it might have been better to create a different award category or hand out a special award or something. The idea of politicizing “normal” categories for something that has little to nothing to do with actual quality just doesn’t seem right to me.
And BTW: I’m not saying that it was wrong to recognize Red Tails as the first real black blockbuster. But if that’s what you want to do, do it right. Red Tails was an important milestone but it was anything but outstanding. ;-)