I am so smart, S-M-R-T!!!

Happy Feet snuck past the heavily-favoured Cars to take the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film, confounding almost every critic except moi. I am so proud. ;)

I predicted Happy Feet would win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film and I was right. Go me.

I felt that the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film would be a two-horse race between George Miller's Happy Feet and John Lasseter's Cars. Gil Kenan's Monster House (despite being a fave of many critics, including Roger Ebert and JoBlo's Jim Law) didn't stand a chance, mainly because it didn't even make its studio costs back in theatres.

I also judged that Happy Feet's environmental message (witness the love given to Al Gore over An Inconvenient Truth) would score higher with Academy voters than Cars' mammoth box office. That would also cancel Cars' Annie win (in previous years, the Annie Award winner has gone on to take the Oscar as well).

The Academy likes to see acclaimed directors like Miller cross into different genres. Not only that, it doesn't like to see award-winning directors (like Lasseter) release sub-standard material. As I've said many times before, Cars was a B-level effort from a studio that usually cranks out A-level material. Therefore, I thought Happy Feet would win, and it did.

This marks the first year that the Annie Award winner has not also taken the Oscar. It's also the first year since 2002 that a Pixar film got nominated for the Best Animated Feature Film Oscar but didn't win.

I will admit that Torill Kove's The Danish Poet surprised me by winning Best Animated Short. I had pegged Blue Sky's No Time For Nuts as Oscar's apology for not nominating Ice Age: The Meltdown for Best Animated Feature Film. However, the National Film Board of Canada has a long and honourable history cranking out Oscar winning shorts and The Danish Poet is now the latest in that tradition.

So who will take the Oscar next year? Stay tuned.