Alice in Wonderland | Of Modern Proportions

We warmed up earlier this month with the People’s Choice Awards, but now Awards Season begins in earnest with the Golden Globes. By the way, People’s Choice Awards, you may need to reassess your existence if you’re nothing more than an unnoticed ramp-up to the ridiculous disaster that is the Golden Globes. And I’m sure you noticed that I didn’t even bother with you, Critics’ Choice Awards.

As per the usual, my wife Johanna and I will be competing in a winner-picking competition. We’ve done this for nine award shows and I’ve beaten her eight times. Her one win? Last year’s Golden Globes. That doesn’t bode well for me tonight; I suspect her tendency to make at least one or two crazy choices really helps her because of the general goofiness of the Hollywood Foreign Press.

She wants the win, too. You guys should have seen her agonizing over her ballot! I thought she was going to have a breakdown making her picks. She also had to fulfill her role as award show bartender. In honor of the foreign voters and the drunken, vaguely trashy vibe of the evening, she’s whipped us up a wine spritzer with equal parts Chardonnay, Sprite Zero, and Diet Orange Fanta. As she set it down in front of me she said, “These are relatively disgusting, BTW,” but I’m enjoying mine so far. She’s calling it the “Slutty Exchange Student” and assures me that she’s working on a second concoction for later this evening.

All right, let’s get started. As always, categories and winners in bold. Take it away, Ricky Gervais!

8:01 – Here’s Ricky! As I said last year, I think he’s perfect for this job, mostly because he doesn’t seem to care much about offending people and he doesn’t seem stiff and over-prepared. I’m looking forward to it.

His drinking a beer on stage thing is starting to feel like a gimmick, though.

8:04 – The audience has definitely warmed to him since last year. He’s getting more laughs from the famous people up front. Robert De Niro is certainly enjoying himself.

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I’m a very big Disney fan, and sort of a burgeoning animation geek, so I’m much more familiar with these movies than your average red-blooded 27-year-old American male with no children has any right to be. That said, while I’ve seen some of these very recently, a lot of this is based on half-remembered thoughts and opinions. So this might not exactly be my definitive list. Also, Pixar movies don’t count here; this is just Disney Animation Studios stuff. Here’s the official list. In honor of my upcoming, highly anticipated trip to Walt Disney World, here are my thirty favorite Disney Animated Classics (movies I haven’t seen, or don’t remember, are excluded and listed at the end).

30) The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)

I haven’t seen this movie since it came out, and I don’t remember it that well, really. But I was utterly disappointed by it at the time, and it certainly confirmed to us what Pocahontas had hinted at the year before: the modern golden age of Disney classics was over.

29) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

This movie is a big deal. It’s the first full-length animated film ever made. At the time, people thought making a feature-length animated movie was ridiculous. Reading about Walt Disney’s drive to get this made and the technological breakthroughs he and his animators made during the production is even sort of inspiring. That said, this movie is boring as hell nowadays. And the animation style, in my opinion, is not at all visually interesting.

28) Pinocchio (1940)

This movie gave us “When You Wish Upon A Star,” which is a great song. That’s pretty much all it has going for it. It’s divided into three completely unrelated, nonsensical acts, each possibly more dull than the last. Rarely does an hour and a half feel this long.

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