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The Oscar Nominations were announced today, and Andy Serkis was left off the list. The actor was highly praised for his motion-capture performance as Caesar the chimp in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and there was a strong campaign to get him recognised in this year’s award ceremony, but ultimately it all came to naught. We can’t say it’s any surprise.
Serkis’s achievement is undeniable. He’s pioneered a new form of acting, delivering a string of memorable performances in films from The Lord of the Rings, King Kong, and The Adventures of Tintin. His role as Caesar is multi-faceted and heart-rending, and doubly impressive given that he’s practically silent for the duration of the film. But his mo-capped output is a troubling matter for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Heads in the Sand
To allow him entry to any of the acting categories is the beginning of a complex debate over the nature of acting itself, and what constitutes a live action performance. The boundary between live action and computer animated imagery has been repeatedly blurred, but the Academy would rather bury their collective heads in the sand than face up to the issue.
Let’s put things in perspective. Nobody really looks to the Oscars as a true barometer of cinematic quality. Dances With Wolves beat Goodfellas to the Best Movie gong in 1990 – which of those two films have been more enduring in popular memory? But the Oscars are an important presence in the landscape of film, if only for Hollywood to decide amongst themselves what the best films of the year have been, and provide debate to the wider world about how wrong they are.
And there’s also the fact that the medium of film is habitually changed by technology. The transition from silent film to the talkies; from black & white to colour; from film to digital; from 2D to 3D, there’s been a steady march of progress, and commercial imperatives have driven their assimilation. Why should mo-cap acting be any different?
Tired Objections
There is an argument that the performance of Caesar that we see on the screen is not the work of one man, but the work of many. Serkis strapped on the suit and bounced around the set on all fours, but it took a sizeable team of artists to articulate the musculature, skin, and hair. That may be the case, but is that really any different from the standard film crew which provides the sound, lighting, and other effects that optimise a live-action performance?
Also, this line of reasoning presumes that mo-cap acting is a solitary activity, recorded in isolation from the other cast members. If you watch the making-of featurette embedded above, you’ll see that isn’t the case. Serkis fully interacted with other members of the cast, eliciting an emotional response from them that couldn’t be achieved by other means.
Finally, when it comes to awarding a performance where you don’t actually see the actor on-screen, there is a precedent, of sorts. In 1981, John Hurt was Oscar-nominated for Best Actor for his performance as John Merrick in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man. Playing a character who was horribly disfigured, Hurt’s own features were completely buried under prosphetics. Yet despite not being able to recognise the man beneath the make-up, his acting was extraordinary.
The Artist and The Apes
Another argument is that… actually, we can’t be bothered to rehash the tired objections of a tired bunch of has-beens. Just give Serkis his due, and recognise his achievement now, instead of several decades from now, where mo-cap acting will be the standard practice and not demeaned as a strange, illusory anomaly. Serkis’s co-star from RotPofA, James Franco, has written an open letter to Deadline making that very same point.
The supreme irony, of course, is that this year’s runaway candidate for Best Film Oscar is The Artist. It’s a film about the silent era of Hollywood, shot in black and white and completely without dialogue. It’s a great, great film, and deserves to be showered with accolades. But the signal that Hollywood will be giving out is reactionary and conservative, celebrating one film that looks to past glories whilst simultaneously shutting out another film technique that defies easy categorisation.
It is a passionate subject, but it hinges on the big question, is a mo-cap performance acting or puppetry? As someone is doing a performance that is translated into data and then expressed on a digital asset by a huge technical team means it is digital puppetry mixed with animation.
And while we can understand and see that Serkis’ performance is sunning, we really don’t know how much of it is him in the final performance, what if the director feels Serkis overplayed or underplayed a scene? No problem, a talented animation team knows how to fix it to the Directors needs perfectly.
I think as mo-cap performances become more abound that we will maybe have an award to reflect this, but in all fairness we have never had film awards for best puppetry or even best animatronic puppetry, so why single out digital puppetry as something more special than other forms.
I do get that he is talented, and we currently have an unfair bias against this kind of performance, but unless you watch his whole mo-cap motions next to the finished results it is impossible to judge. And Serkis is a great actor that has crafted a niche in these roles, probably because he has a good face for mo-cap, and not for Hollywood acting.
Serkis would absolutely say it’s all performance. And I agree.
You could say the same for the modern vocalist, who’s voice is treated and tampered with using elctronic effects to create a better, improved performance for the benefit of the song. The song can still win a Grammy though.
I’d agree, but a bet a team of highly trained animators would disagree. And while it is a performance, is it acting? It is no more or no less digital puppetry if it is done in real time or done over two years by a Pixar animator – let us get the award for them first, Best Animated Character in an Animated Feature.
And it isn’t the same as a vocalist winning a Grammy for a song, that would be like the film winning Best Picture, even with some ropey effects. It would be the same as someone winning an award for Best Vocalist even if we know it wasn’t a pure vocal performance.
One of the Grammy categories is the “Record of the Year” This is awarded to the performer and the production team of a song. But equally, it could be a Brit – The point is that someone can be recognised for a achievement where Technology played a big part in that performance – actually improving so much that without the tech, the performer woudn’t have won. I don’t know, just another way of looking at it.
I think it would be rather too much of a stretch for hollywood to honour a mute motion captured performance, one where the actor contributes dialogue, too, is likely to do a lot better.
In which case, if Serkis can really sell it with Gollum in The Hobbit, he might have a shot at a supporting actor nod. It’s a shame for him, though, that Gollum’s best bits are in The Two Towers, and that’s been and gone.
Yet a silent film is nominated….
My feeling is people make this more complex than it really is. For a “conventional role”, the actor goes through makeup and costume prior to his performance, mo-cap actors give their performance half way through makeup and costume. When all said and done, the suits they wear are simply targets for the makeup and costume department (Weta and such like) to do their thing. The performance is still belongs to the actor. And please don’t try to tell me that conventional movies don’t have some post processing done either, of course they do. I think over all, we’re seeing a manifestation of the same attitude that Hollywood displays in regards to pirating movies and its outdated business model. They’re stuck in the past, as the author of the article said, conservative and reactionary
But this shows all the regard for what the actor is giving and total disregard for what the animator is giving, it is a joint effort, I don’t see how you can give one half credit and totally disregard the other. Serkis has been quoted in saying they just joint up the frames of data, and add accent, which is rubbish – if that’s all they did why doesn’t he take a weekend course to joint up frames of data, I’ll tell you why he doesn’t, because they are a highly skilled team of artists that turn his performance into something beyond that.
I’m a 3D animator working in the industry in London. Having spoken with people who have been on the receiving end of this man’s motion capture data, I can assure you, the art is in the animator who in some cases, is forced to reanimate entire sequences by hand as the data simply doesn’t fit.
Don’t believe me? Check out this guys animation show reel where the majority of the rise of the planet of the apes footage is hand animated: http://engelanimation.com/engelanimation/Engel_Animation.html
I still believe it is a joint effort, without the Animators then Serkis is a guy in a funny suit pretending to be an Ape, not good, without Serkis the animators have a much harder job – but having said that you can make that film without Serkis, but you can’t make it without the animators – harder work but maybe the performance would be better, animators don’t lack the skills. And why have we never had this debate regarding rotoscoped performances? Which is similar. And why is Spielberg telling people Tintin is an animation when it is originated mostly from mocap performances? Maybe because it is rubbish and he wouldn’t win an oscar if it is classed as a normal film, but probably because he understands that it doesn’t matter if you just use an actors voice, or movements and voice, it is just a starting point to making the animation work – it is source material. And I don’t know if anyone has ever done animation, or seen it getting made first hand, but animators act, they have a mirror and pull faces into it, and video their own movements and move around to use that material also.
Hard debate, I do see Serkis’ side, and I see the animator’s side, and I’ve got to say it is a joint effort for a complete performance, but if I got to make a call the animator gets it, far more talent, with a deeper skill set, harder graft with much more time spent working and learning on making the final film that is enjoyed by us.
Its true about filming reference footage. I’m just about to go home and film myself acting like an idiot for the next few hours as it so happens. Its good inspiration for poses and such
I used to care about whether or not people/movies were nominated. But then I took an arrow to the knee.
I used to make condescending comments about how unoriginal and repetitive that joke was but then… I dunno. I took a hippo to the face?
Shame Lucas didn’t put the effort into making Star Wars CGI feel life like, instead of the generic bullshit the new films feel.
The new ones make the old ones look like classics
Did you hear Lucas is retired, partly because he funded his latest film thinking the studios will pay for the release, but won’t touch it as it has a black cast, and it wouldn’t have an international market – some not even arsed to turn up for the screening – it’s that shit.
Then he also blamed these pesky Star Wars fanatics:
Lucas said: “Why would I make any more, when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?”
You can almost hear them in the streets, Lucas – Jah Jah Binks sucks – I hate you man.
As the 1st commenter respectfully says on the Telegraph website story:
“Lucas is retiring?
I wish he had retired years ago and left the Star Wars prequels to someone who actually cared for the series and wasn’t just interested in dollars.
He MANGLED the original Trilogy out of nothing more than pure hubris.
That he to this day point blank refuses to release the original trilogy theatrical versions in a restored blu-ray set tells you all you need to know.
Good riddance.
(Edited by a moderator)”
See, I’m of the opinion he just sucks, and always did, the whole 6 films stand up well as a continuous stream of crap, I think people look back on the originals with rose tinted glasses, watch them for what they are, a B-movie space fantasy for children – The best Lucas ever did was American Graffiti, and that sucks balls. And Star Wars is just Howard The Duck in space. I reckon it has just dawned on Hollywood that the guy is an idiot.
I’ve wanted to get that off my chest for years
(your normal comments will now commence – look, Star Wars made from lego by a 40 year old dick – JFC)
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Sorry. Massive comment doing me head in. Roll on the new comment things.