Star Wars: PETA Honors ‘The Last Jedi’ With “Oscats Awards”

The Last Jedi might not have earned as many Academy Award nominations as most fans had expected, but it managed to take some top honors at the “Oscats Awards,” with PETA recognizing the positive depictions of the film’s ethical treatment of animals.

The latest chapter in the Star Wars saga earned the Best Live-Action Movie and Best Original Screenplay awards, thanks to Rose and Finn’s storyline in which they broke the fathiers out of captivity and the scene in which Chewbacca opted to not eat a porg.

Another big award of the evening was the Best Actor prize, which was shared between Andy Serkis for War for the Planet of the Apes and Doug Jones for The Shape of Water. The performers shared the distinction for their abilities which “captured the despair felt by those who are abused and kept chained.”

Not only were the depictions of animals on screen in The Last Jedi fascinating, but one of the most adorable creatures in the film, the porgs, werecreated to pay respects to puffins that inhabited a shooting location of the film.

“(We) had gone to shoot this sequence on Skellig Michael, which is the real island location that stands in for Ahch-To, and that island is covered in puffins,” designer Jake Lunt Davies told StarWars.com. “It’s a wildlife preserve and everywhere you look there are hundreds of birds dotted around the landscape.”

The abundance of the birds caused the production team to improvise.

“You physically can’t get rid of them, and digitally removing them is an issue and a lot of work, so let’s just roll with it, play with it,” Davies pointed out. “And so I think [writer/director Rian Johnson] thought, Well, that’s great, let’s have our own indigenous species.’”

The first appearance of the creatures, which was in a behind-the-scenes reel that debuted at last year’s D23 Expo, immediately caused audiences to be enamored with them.

“It was a huge surprise. You are concerned about audience reaction,” Davies admitted. “I want to create something that I can be proud of, obviously. And then I kind of forgot about it really, because we got caught up in the next one and in Solo, and then they released the trailer and the little clip behind the scenes with the porgs. I was surprised when, suddenly, the Internet goes crazy for it and it turned into a meme fest.”

The Last Jedi hits Digital HD on March 13th and on Blu-ray and DVD on March 27th.

Which creature in The Last Jedi was your favorite? Let us know in the comments below!

[H/T The Hollywood Reporter]