It was a quiet night at Dave and Rita Docter's home in Bloomington, even though their son Pete won his first Academy Award for the Pixar cartoon "Up."

"Boy, never did I dream that making a flip book out of my third-grade math book would lead to this. Boy!" Docter said as he accepted the award. "It was an incredible adventure making it but the heart of it came from home." He thanked his parents ("they were so supportive"), his kids, Nicholas and Ellie, and his wife, Amanda.

"You guys are the greatest adventure," he said.

At his boyhood home, his parents "leapt up and screamed out loud a little bit," said Dave, 72. They missed Pete's acknowledgement of their support because "we were screaming," he said.

They liked their son's speech, he added. "It certainly makes one proud. He has a good way of emphasizing that it's a team effort and including people. Not saying 'I' all the time."

Rita, 68, agreed with the punchline from her son's speech. "I think that's the adventure that means the most -- the adventures with family, and the relationships that you have with people in the world," she said.

"We always believed in him, and if he had an idea we tried to make it happen, whether it was buying film or art supplies." Pete wore out several cheap movie cameras experimenting with stop-motion animation, and illustrated hymns for his mother's choir classes -- valuable practice that gave him an advantage over other animators, he told her. He once did a set of drawings to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony that his mother thought was better than "Fantasia."

The Docters were optimistic about Pete's chances. He had been nominated four times before, for Pixar's "Toy Story," "Monsters, Inc." and "Wall-E." Rita said, "I thought this time he had a better chance, given all the other awards he's gotten."

Dave agreed, but they were equally low-key when Pete lost the best original screenplay competition to Mark Boal for "The Hurt Locker." "We didn't really expect it to win," Dave said. Similarly, they didn't expect the film to take the best picture prize.

"It was a great honor for them to be included in that category," Dave said.

The Docters never made a big fuss about the Academy Awards before Pete became a fixture at the ceremony, and they don't now. They made a snack for dinner and watched the show at home together. They didn't chill a bottle of champagne.

"We have some popcorn here. We might get into that later," Dave said.

They don't subscribe to premium cable TV, so they had to find a website showing pictures of Pete and Amanda arriving on the red carpet.

"It's odd to see him in a tuxedo," Dave said, "because he's usually in a T-shirt. That's the animator's uniform."

Other Minnesotans didn't fare so well at the Oscars. The Coen brothers were 0-for-2 for their Minnesota-made best-picture nominee "A Serious Man." Another St. Louis Park native, Stephen Rivkin, lead editor on "Avatar," lost to eventual best-picture winner "The Hurt Locker." And Minneapolis producer Bill Pohlad's film "Food Inc." came up short in the documentary category.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186