The Oscar nominations are in. Naturally I went directly to the “Best Animated Feature Film of the Year” category and got a bit of a shock. There was no nomination for The Adventures of Tintin.

Really Hollywood? You honestly believe that Kung Fu Panda 2 was a better movie than Tintin? What have you been smoking? (Don’t answer that.)

Maybe the problem is that the computer-generated animation in Tintin is just too realistic, so people really don’t think of it as an animated movie. But that’s just about the minimum level of realism needed to cross the Uncanny Valley. If people won’t accept it as animation then that doesn’t bode well for the future of CG animation as an art form.

The actual list of nominees:

• A Cat in Paris (2010): Alain Gagnol, Jean-Loup Felicioli
• Chico & Rita (2010): Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal
• Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011): Jennifer Yuh
• Puss in Boots (2011): Chris Miller
• Rango (2011): Gore Verbinski

There’s an unwritten rule that the winner has to be a big-budget Hollywood movie using computer-generated animation. (The only exception was Spirited Away, but that was in 2002, the first year that the Animation Oscar was awarded, and the voters didn’t know the rules yet.) So the possible winners are KFP2, Puss in Boots and Rango. If the voters have any sense it will surely be Rango.