La La Land has been nominated for 14 Academy Awards, and that's great.

Arrival has been nominated for 8 Academy Awards (missing one for Amy Adams, but this is not the reason why I'm writing this review), and the best film of 2016 in my opinion, Manchester by the Sea, has been nominated for 6 Academy Awards. Great.

But there's one thing no one noticed: Google's Spotlight short film Pearl has been nominated for an Oscar in the category "Best Animated Short".

In fact, Pearl isn't actually bad, I prefered Patrick Osborne's animated Disney short film Feast which was just beautiful, but Pearl is okay.

But the real problem is that Pearl is one of those silly 360-degrees/VR- videos which are trending on YouTube for a while now.

Technically I have no problem with those, but I do have a problem if one of those videos gets nominated for the most important movie award of the year.

Let me explain: Just imagine, maybe in 50 years the new generations only watch films per oculus rifts? Right now there are already VR cinemas! And I'm sure there won't be only popular 360 short films, even "long" movies are going to be produced in 360 someday.

If Pearl really wins this Oscar, it wouldn't be a good sign for the future of cinema, because basically Pearl tries to kill cinema - the cinema we know and love.

A film's made by an artist, and the artist decides what he wanna show and what he doesn't wanna show. It shouldn't be the spectator who decides what he wants to look at. CINEMATOGRAPHY AND EDITING ARE ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ELEMENTS OF FILM, AND WE MUSTN'T ALLOW THEM TO BECOME EXTINCT. At least, we must not allow a movie which doesn't use these to get an Oscar. Aside of that films are experienced with other human beings because movies talk about human beings (and their problems) and are made by human beings. If you take your smartphone and you have to move it to watch at the scene, you aren't watching a film. Even less if you're watching it with an oculus rift (this would cause many other problems if everyone only watches movies with oculus rifts btw).

Talking of movies which are made by humans: there was already another short film in 2016 which wanted to be the start of the end of cinema: SUNSPRING by Oscar Sharp.

This film was written by a computer (an Artificial Intelligence called Benjamin) who "read" scripts of science-fiction movies and made a screenplay himself, without any sense at all. Many people thought this film to be amazing, in my opinion it was just stupid as shit, but the real problem is that this short film is probably just the beginning: same as the 360-movies, I think that there are going to be "real" movies made by computers.

If a computer helps people with their work, that's okay, for example with CG effects. But here, the computer WROTE THE SCREENPLAY. How much time will it take until the first computer calculates the camera movements, edits a movie without any human's help or even directs a movie? Computers are NOT able to make art. FILMS ARE MADE BY HUMANS. No discussion.

I think that we, people who really love movies, the Letterboxd Community, have to stop allowing computers to make movies and 360-videos becoming the new way of watching movies.

If you love movies (I DO!), you should hope that Pearl won't win the Oscar for Best Animated Short "Film". I do.