Should he win an Oscar at next week's ceremony, Roy Disney, the nephew of Walt, says he intends to use the platform to attack Disney's beleaguered chairman, Michael Eisner, for taking the company away from its founder's values.
"I honestly think it will be implicit," he told the Los Angeles Times when asked if he would use the ceremony to attack Disney's current leadership.
"I will leave it up to my own mouth."
Mr Disney is nominated in the best short animated film category as producer of Destino, a restored collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí.
The film was begun in 1945 but was forgotten until 2000, when Roy Disney was working on Fantasia 2000.
Destino has won backing from veteran animators, many of whom are members of the academy which votes for the Oscars.
They see Mr Disney as a champion of the traditional skills and values which, they argue, have been usurped by the rise of computer-aided animation.
Should their votes propel Destino to an Oscar, their hope is that Mr Disney will take the opportunity to fire off a salvo against Mr Eisner.
Such an attack would be the latest in a series of woes for a company known in Hollywood as the Mouse House.
Disney is fighting off a hostile takeover bid from the US communications company Comcast.
The fallout from last autumn's ejection of Mr Disney from the company's board is also rumbling on.
Mr Disney is lobbying the company's shareholders to vote against Mr Eisner's re-election as chairman.
The company announced this week that it had bought the rights to the Muppets for $90m (£47.5m), but many shareholders will see it as scant recompense for the demise of Disney's agreement with Pixar, the animation studio behind the Toy Story franchise and last year's hit, Finding Nemo.
Mr Disney has also criticised the company for laying off animators at several of its studios, a move dictated by the group's financial advisers.
"Roy has become a sort of prism of anger," Tom Sito, president of the animation guild told the LA Times.
"He's the only person powerful enough to stand up to Michael and not be afraid. I think it's the emotional favourite because of Roy."
The collaboration between Disney and Dalí came about after they met at a Hollywood dinner party given by the film mogul Jack Warner.
At the time Dalí was working on the title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound.
The collaboration petered out after Disney hit financial problems and only an 18-second fragment of the film remained.
But in 2000 Mr Disney came across storyboards and Dalí's illustrations for the film.
It is a sign of the animosity between the two men that Mr Disney kept the project secret from Mr Eisner.
The film, which has no dialogue, is an adaptation of a ballad by the Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez.
Originally intended to be of segment in a post-war musical, it features many typical Dalí motifs, including dripping clockfaces, classical ruins and eyeballs.
Although there is no narrative, a dancer moves through bizarre settings undergoing a series of transformations, from the shadow of a bell in a campanile to a dandelion puff.
The film has won several awards since its premiere in France last year, including best short film at the Melbourne film festival and a special prize from the Los Angeles film critics association.
