The Oscars reward the previous year’s greatest cinema achievements as determined by some of the world’s most accomplished motion picture artists and professionals, and represent the highest honors in filmmaking. The Academy’s roughly 6,000 members vote for the Oscars using secret ballots, which are tabulated by an international auditing firm. Keep your fingers crossed that this important film takes home the Oscar in March so that the spotlight will continue to shine on Taiji, and the world will open its eyes to the atrocities that occur there.
The Cove, which opened in August 2009 across the United States, profiles the dramatic efforts of a small group of activists to document and expose the annual slaughter of thousands of dolphins in the Japanese drive hunts. This documentary exposes these hunts in a dramatic action film that has continued to receive accolades and commendations from film festivals across the globe over the past year since its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, USA last January.
On its face, the topic of the film may discourage some from seeing it. However, the film is a beautiful, moving and important film that balances its minimal graphic moments within an inspirational panorama of characters to paint an enduring portrait of the marine environment, its inhabitants and the complex interests that threaten their survival. With a PG-13 rating, WDCS encourages everyone to see this film.
The drive hunts in Japan are a devastatingly cruel practice that involves the corralling of dolphins at sea and driving them into the confines of small coves in Taiji and Futo, Japan. Here, they are slaughtered for meat or kept alive for sale to marine parks and aquaria across the globe. This is not a subsistence kill but a small industry regulated by the Japanese government. Yearly quotas for both villages are in the thousands, where small cetaceans of several species including bottlenose dolphins, striped dolphins, spotted dolphins, false killer whales and short-finned pilot whales, are taken. No drive hunts have taken place in Futo since 2004 and the focus is on Taiji, where the hunts occur each season from September through April.
The awards will be broadcast on March 7th at 5PM PST/8PM EST on ABC.
http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/82/nominees.html