UPDATE, JAN. 24, 6:08 P.M.: Well, that was quick.
About 24 hours after it was announced that Kobe Bryant’s Dear Basketball scored an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short, an online petition asking the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to rescind the nomination had 7,000 signatures.
A 6 p.m. check showed 9,792 signatures, with a goal of reaching 10,000.
The title of the Care2 petition explains it all: “Take Oscar Nomination Away From Kobe Byrant, a Known Rapist.”
Petition author Kelsey Bourgeois pitch to would-be signers:
The Oscars almost avoided nominating sexual predators for awards. Woody Allen and James Franco didn’t get anything. But Kobe Bryant, who was charged with a horrific sexual assault, was nominated.
In 2003, Kobe Bryant raped a 19-year-old hotel employee. He tried to avoid being charged by paying off his victim and settled a civil assault case out of court.
An important conversation has been started about sexual assualt and harassment, so why is Bryant being honored for best animated short if Time really is Up?
“The Oscars almost avoided nominating men accused of sexual assault, but made a serious misstep nominating Bryant,” writes Bourgeois in an email. “Women who have experienced sexual trauma should not have to watch Bryant enjoy the praise and recognition that comes with the Academy’s endorsement.”
It is believed that abuse allegations, coupled with the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, torpedoed the expected Oscar nomination for Golden Globe winner Franco.
ORIGINAL POST, JAN. 24, 5 A.M.: It was announced early Tuesday that Dear Basketball, which sprang out of Kobe Bryant’s NBA retirement poem of the same name, received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short.
The six-minute film, which screened during December’s Animation Show of Shows at the Frida Cinema in downtown Santa Ana, goes up against fellow Oscar nominees Lou, Garden Party, Negative Space and Revolting Rhymes.
The 90th Academy Awards, which will be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, will be broadcast on March 4.
Bryant is executive producer of Dear Basketball through his Newport Beach multilevel business Kobe Inc. and Kobe Studios. The short was directed by former Disney animator Glen Keane, and its music was scored by legendary film composer John Williams.
Newport Coast resident and future first-ballot NBA Hall of Famer Bryant expressed his thrill at the Oscar nomination via Twitter.
He also received congratulations there from a certain ESPN commentator.
As I wrote in my preview of the 19th-annual Animation Show of Shows, Bryant and Keane decided early on to use hand-drawn as opposed to computer-generated images, and the result to me resembles the 1985 A-ha music video for the song “Take On Me.” Sketches get filled in with more color as time marches on for a 6-year-old boy who ultimately realizes his dream of becoming a basketball star.
You no longer have to go to a festival to see the film, as Bryant makes it available here:
https://www.go90.com/videos/261MflWkD3N
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.