When The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced this year's batch of nominees, one of the most notable snubs that had movie fans all kinds of riled up was the omission of Phil Lord and Chris Miller's The LEGO Movie. Despite the fact that the movie was one of the most critically appreciated titles of the year, and also one of the biggest box office hits, the Academy felt it fine to ignore it in favor of fiver other titles. But Lord and Miller have been getting their own form of retribution since, and the latest came during the BAFTA Awards ceremony.
As you may have noted in our rundown of the BAFTA Award winners, The LEGO Movie beat out both Big Hero 6 and The Boxtrolls for the title of Best Animated Film of 2014, and when Phil Lord and Chris Miller took to the stage, they used part of their acceptance speech time to both diss the rewarding organization and the one that ignored them a few weeks ago. According to a report from Digital Spy, Lord announced to the audience,
You are our favorite Academy by far, and this is clearly the most fun I've had in an opera house by far, also. You guys win the award for Best Academy. This is the end of the awards road for us, so we can say whatever we want. There's no-one left to impress.
As alluded to earlier, this isn't the first time that Phil Lord has publicly responded to The LEGO Movie's Oscar snub in a snarky, clever fashion. Shortly after the Academy Award nominees were announced, the filmmaker took to his personal Twitter account and posted,
While an Academy Award for The LEGO Movie would have been nice - and certainly well-deserved - Phil Lord and Chris Miller obviously don't have too much to complain about.With just about all of the numbers in, it currently sits as the fifth highest grossing domestic hit of 2014 and the 16th highest worldwide. It's also been doing extremely well on home video, thus far bringing in nearly $111 million. Oh, and there's both a direct sequel in the works as well as a spin-off following one of the most popular characters, Will Arnett's Batman. So yes, it does suck that the Oscars didn't feel that the film was worth celebrating, but it's also pretty clear that they are in the minority where the larger audience is concerned.
