That was my explanation, too, after having read a few insider Oscar-predicting pundits who were also saying "Haven't yet caught this new Ralph thing the young kids are into; seems to doing fine with the critics, but we know it's Pixar's award every year!"Ben wrote:I know for a fact that someone I know, who isn't "young" and who voted in the Baftas and the Oscars, didn't have time to watch all their screeners this year and went for Brave based on it being "the Pixar movie". When I said they should check WIR out (well after the Oscars had been and gone) and they did, after also finally seeing Brave, they said that they preferred it and "wish I'd voted for that one now". But they did vote for Paperman, so I'll let them off...
Outside of the animation fans and the game nuts, Ralph's "unlikely" good audience word of mouth was reaching out slowly to the regular folk by December, and even now most of the posts we see on the net are "I finally rented Ralph on disk, why didn't I go see it in the theaters??"
Uh, YEAH. Why didn't you. Especially the folks with ballots.
As for Brave, I admit, even I thought "magic" Pixar Can Do Anything was going to pull theirs out of the fire just based on the trailers, and can't blame most of the disgruntled Up/TS3 voters for thinking the same way. We can blame them for not doing their homework, though.