This piece in the Los Angeles Times reports that Spirited Away won the major awards at the animation industry's Annie awards, and suggests that this may indicate that it will win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature as well. While I would like to see this happen, I still very much doubt that it will. The trouble is the way in which the Oscar voting works. An animation committee decides the nominees, and then the academy as a whole gets to vote on the winner. And the academy as a whole is middle of the road in its tastes, relatively old, and not expert about animation. This does not increase the chances of a Japanese animated film that relatively few people saw winning, however great it is. (Given that the nominating committee does consist of animation experts, a nomination is certain, and I suspect that the film will receive the highest score from the nominating committee, although we will never know this as the results of academy votes are never released to the public).