Saturday, the Annie Awards and USC Scripter award winners will be announced. If they are available before I close the site down, I will post them. Otherwise, it may have to wait until after.

But, until then, I’m posting our contributor’s fearless predictions for those awards. While my contemporaries are voting only on the Animated Feature category, I will make predictions in all of the other categories. We’ll start with the Scripter and then finish with the Annie Awards. I’ll list the nominees in each category and then bold the prediction with the name of the predictor to the side.

USC Scripter

Best Adapted Screnplay

Crazy Heart
District 9
An Education (Peter)
Precious
Up in the Air (Wesley, Tripp)

Wesley Lovell: In its 23-year history, the USC Scripter has matched up to the Academy Award winner for Adapted Screenplay only 6 times (Slumdog Millionaire, No Country for Old Men, A Beautiful Mind, L.A. Confidential, Sense and Sensibility and Schindler’s List). We don’t really have an equivalent this year. The only comparison is that in every case but two, their selections were Best Picture winners and the remaining two were contenders. Looking back at the history of this group, it’s really hard to find a correlation between any of the winners that isn’t how “literary” the work is and even then, there are exceptions. I have a hard time deciding. All but Crazy Heart have their possibilities. District 9 is based on a sci-fi novel (equivalent to Children of Men), An Education is a costume drama (equivalent to The Hours and Sense and Sensibility), Precious is a small, well-acted drama (no historical comparison) and Up in the Air is a witty serio-comic work (similar to non-winner Sideways, but no one else). So, it really is a tough decision with none of these adaptations come from major authors. And since District 9 is adapted from a short film, and An Education and Precious are both based on memoirs, I’m giving the edge to Up in the Air simply because it’s based on a traditional work of literary fiction, something this group loves more than just about anything.
Peter J. Patrick: The USC Scripter award generally goes to the year’s most literary adaptation. This year that could be one of three films: Up in the Air, Precious or An Education but since I have to pick one I’ll go with An Education which follows the book more closely than the other two and resembles a Masterpiece Theatre Presentation to boot.
Tripp Burton: Nothing much to say about either of them. They seem pretty obvious.

Annie Awards

Animated Feature

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Coraline (Wesley)
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Princess and the Frog
The Secret of Kells
Up (Peter, Tripp)

Wesley Lovell: I’m going out on a limb here and picking Coraline to win. It was the most nominated film and in the last ten years, only one film has won without being the most nominated and that was Spirited Away. And since Hayao Miyazaki’s films have never been big number-tally nominees, he shows up consistently and it’s no surprise that, with Oscar going the same way, that his film would win that year. And after WALL-E came away with an astounding zero awards last year, we know for a fact that Pixar is not unstoppable (Monsters, Inc. also lost out the year Spirited Away won). But, Pixar has won every other contest it’s been in, 5 of 7, so it’s still possible Up, which was the second highest on the nomination tally scale, it could still eke out a win, but I’m not going to bet on that. (For the nomination tallies of the last 10 years, see the end of this article.)
Peter J. Patrick: Fantastic Mr. Fox may be a threat, but the Annie traditionally goes to a Pixar film so I see no reason to expect anything other than Up to take home this year’s top prize.
Tripp Burton: Nothing much to say about either of them. They seem pretty obvious.

Animated Short Subject

Pups of Liberty
Robot Chicken: Star Wars 2.5 (Wesley)
Santa, The Fascist Years
The Rooster, The Crocodile and The Night Sky
The Story of Walls
Note (Wesley Lovell:As for this category and the rest on this list, a lot are stabs in the dark. In those categories where I select multiple winners, these are categories in which I’m predicting the film to win, not the specific individual, as I don’t know what each individual is nominated for, but think the film should win that category.

Animated Effects

Scott Cegielski “Monsters vs. Aliens”
Alexander Feigin “9”
Eric Froemling “Up” (Wesley)
Tom Kluyskens “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs”
James Mansfield “The Princess and the Frog”

Character Animation in a Feature Production

Andreas Deja “The Princess and the Frog”
Eric Goldberg “The Princess and the Frog”
Travis Knight “Coraline” (Wesley)
Daniel Nguyen “Up”
Bruce Smith “The Princess and the Frog”

Character Design in a Feature Production

Daniel Lopez Munoz “Up”
Shane Prigmore “Coraline” (Wesley)
Shannon Tindle “Coraline” (Wesley)

Directing in a Feature Production

Wes Anderson “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (Wesley)
Pete Docter “Up”
Christopher Miller, Phil Lord “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs”
Hayao Miyazaki “Ponyo”
Henry Selick “Coraline”

Music in a Feature Production

Bruno Coulais “Coraline”
Michael Giacchino “Up” (Wesley)
Joe Hisaishi “Ponyo”
John Powell “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs”

Production Design in a Feature Production

Christopher Appelhaus “Coraline” (Wesley)
Ian Gooding “The Princess and the Frog”
Tadahiro Uesugi “Coraline” (Wesley)
Christopher Vacher “9”

Storyboarding in a Feature Production

Sharon Bridgeman “Astro Boy”
Chris Butler “Coraline” (Wesley)
Ronnie Del Carmen “Up”
Tom Owens “Monsters vs. Aliens”
Peter Sohn “Up”

Voice Acting in a Feature Production

Jen Cody – Voice of Charlotte – “The Princess and the Frog”
Dawn French – Voice of Miss Forcible – “Coraline” (Wesley)
Hugh Laurie – Voice of Dr. Cockroach Ph.D. – “Monsters vs. Aliens”
John Leguizamo – Voice of Sid – “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaur”
Jennifer Lewis – Voice of Mama Odie – “The Princess and the Frog”

Writing in a Feature Production

Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach – “Fantastic Mr. Fox”
Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Tom McCarthy – “Up” (Wesley)
Timothy Hyde Harris and David Bowers – “Astro Boy”
Christopher Miller and Phil Lord – “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs”

Annie Award Nomination/Winner Tallies

Note: The first number listed is the number of nominees. The number after the slash is the number of awards the film received. Those without a slash were nominees only and did not win any awards. There were three years, where films earned 16 nominations (2008, 2005 & 2004) and every one of them saw those films clean-sweep the 10 feature film categories. The only film to win an award for every nomination was Spirited Away with its 4-for-4 win in 2002.
2009 – Coraline (10), Up (9), The Princess and the Frog (8), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (4)
2008 – Kung Fu Panda (16/10), WALL-E (7), Bolt (5), Horton Hears a Who (5), Waltz with Bashir (4), Tale of Despereaux (4)
2007 – Ratatouille (12/8), Surf’s Up (9/2), Bee Movie (5), The Simpsons Movie (4), Persepolis (4)
2006 – Cars (9/2), Flushed Away (8/5), Over the Hedge (8/3), Monster House (6), Open Season (6), Ice Age 2 (5)
2005 – Wallace & Gromit (16/10), Madagascar (9), Chicken Little (4)
2004 – The Incredibles (16/10), Shark Tale (7), Shrek 2 (7), Ghost in the Shell 2 (4)
2003 – Finding Nemo (12/9), Brother Bear (8), The Jungle Book 2 (5/1), Looney Tunes: Back in Action (4)
2002 – Lilo & Stitch (10/1), Monsters, Inc. (8/1), Spirit: Stallion… (8/4), Ice Age (7), Treasure Planet (7), Spirited Away (4/4)
2001 – Shrek (12/8), The Emperor’s New Groove (11/3), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (6), Osmosis Jones (6)
2000 – Toy Story 2 (9/7), The Road to El Dorado (8), Fantasia 2000 (5/3), Dinosaur (5)