“And the award for ‘Largest EyeBalls Outside of an Anime Production’ goes to…”
Should? Most definitely.
Could? Technically, as explained above, yes… but I have my doubts. Then again, stranger things have happened. I would LOVE to see him get at least the nomination, as I believe he put just as much of himself into that character as any other actor in any other role this year. Of course he would never in a million years win (and I’ll happily eat my shoe if that statement, for whatever cosmic reason, rings false) but just to be nominated would be a remarkable and deserved honour.
Yeah, i let my bias control me there. I just didn’t like Leo in Titanic, or in Man in the Iron Mask, or…well…i don’t recall the other one…but yeah. I just meant it as a simple bias.
Of course, i think Gollum is much more of a looker!! Uh, let’s pretend i didn’t say that ok?
I just want to say that, as far as I’m concerned, Larry Mudd hit it exactly on the head. Well done, sir!
Just to chime in. My favourite part of Gollum was his smile - when his head went forward, his eyes widened, and he got a huge grin on his face… that was great.
This is actually basically from the book. Sam watches Gollum argue with himself. Though in the book his eyes change when he shifts from stinker to slinker and back.
That may be a problem for Serkis getting a nomination this year, but I wonder about next year, since Serkis himself will be playing Smeagol before the ring changed him. The scene may be a short one, but at least they could point to it and say “ok, he WAS physically there” to justify a nom. Assuming, of course, that Gollum’s role is every bit as interesting and moving as in The Two Towers, which I’m sure it will be (I’ve read the book). Elijah Wood said he cried when Jackson showed him a rough cut of ROTK, and I’d bet a dime or so that he was watching Gollum when the tears fell.
It’ll be interesting to see what movies The Return of the King will be up against come Oscar time 2004. People keep saying that THAT will be when Award payday comes for the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy. If it’s a weak field, the members of the Academy could just give them everything, and then some. At the very, very least, they could create a one-time-only “We Are In Awe” Award for Jackson and the trilogy. I fear though, that if such an award were announced ahead of time, voters wouldn’t feel the need to check the ROTK box for all the categories it’s likely to be nominated in.
Every single indication is that ROTK will be bigger, bolder, better and by far the most emotionally heartwrenching and satisfying of the three movies. It will be a force of nature.
12 months to go…
I care about them, and I’m not in the film industry. Films wouldn’t be what they are without those people. It’s right that the Oscars should reward those artists and keep those categories in the show.
The important thing though, that people who bitch about the Oscars forget (or never know) is that the Academy Awards are INDUSTRY awards. They are voted on by people who are members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It’s not a popularity contest and it’s not a hoity-toity artsy fartsy contest. The members of the Academy are as diverse a lot as you could imagine. They range from Bjork to Quentin Tarantino to Maggie Smith to Haley Joel Osment. They are people who work or have worked in the industry. Studio executives don’t vote on the Academy Awards. Critics don’t vote on the Academy Awards. Joe Blows don’t vote on the Academy Awards. We say “the Academy” as if it were an entity with one thought (I do it too) when it’s a whole bunch of people of varying ages, occupations, and places of residents, voting individually. The only things they all have in common is their working in the movie industry and their membership in the Academy. We’ll never get to see the votes that were cast, but I’m sure the numbers are wild. The winner just happens to have gotten a larger number.
People really should lighten up on the Academy Awards. It’s fun and it draws attention to films that might otherwise have been forgotten. Even when a film/actor/whatever is not nominated, if it’s considered a “snub” then even THAT gets people talking about movies. So what that Titanic won, the nomination for L.A Confidential that year got that movie attention it never would have gotten without the AAs or GGs. Critics (who fell all over LAC) are only read and/or seen by a limited number of people. At the very least, the AA’s got the title into the brains of millions of casual movie fans. That’s worth a little bit of bitching.
I don’t think a new category needs to be created to get Andy Serkis nominated, but I do think that if it does happen (which I’m hoping it will), it should be a co-nomination for Andy Serkis and the WETA Workshop (were they the ones who did the CGI?).
As has been stated before, makeup artists and costume designers all play a large role in how we perceive a character. These artists have their own category because every movie uses them to some degree. If a new category needed to be created to allow Andy Serkis to get a nomination, he would win without competition since Gollum is the only such character in any movie this past year (well, maybe not - I didn’t see very many movies last year, but if the competition were the likes of Tobey Maguire/CGI Spiderman, Ahmed Best/Jar Jar Binks, etc., there’s no doubt who would win).
I think that the WETA Workshop deserves more than a nomination in a visual effects category. That would be like nominating Einstein for a “pretty good idea” award. Half of what brought Gollum so magnificently to life was their work in the modeling, texturing, tweaking, and fine details of Gollum. They probably also wrote the software that controlled the motion capturing. At the very least, they must have made great new strides with exisitng technology to get such a true representation of Andy Serkis into the CGI model. The performance could not have been accomplished without both Andy Serkis and the entire team of visual effects artists, and I think, therefore, that there should be a co-nomination for the both of them. I also think, that this, in and of itself, would be enough of a shake-up that the Academy and others will start taking a more serious approach to these sorts of things and won’t just give out token nominations due to mass appeal.
My thoughts exactly. ROTK will be simply stupendous; breathtaking… the thought of waiting eleven months and some-odd days to be knocked off my feet is frankly daunting. Also, because it will have a “real” ending (and a fucking doozy of one, I wager) ROTK will definitely stand a better chance at Best Picture.
I’m up for the idea of co-nomination of the CGI techs & Serkis - the sum of both parts created the larger whole; the combo certainly makes for an Oscar-worthy performance.
I think two seperate nominations make more sense. Both efforts are worthy on their own, and the appropriate categories already exist. Why complicate things?
Here’s a great pic of Serkis as Smeagol in ROTK, from Andy Serkis’ website.
A co-nomination for which award? I could definitely see Serkis sharing credit with the CGI team in a technical/special effects category, where there is generally a collaborative effort involved. But I doubt it would even be possible to nominate Serkis and the CGI team as a co-nomination in, say, the Best Supporting Actor category. IANAE, but I am pretty certain that only individuals can be nominated for those awards. It is probably just a pipe dream that even Serkis alone might be nominated for an acting award, but a nomination for him and the CGI people together for an acting award would be WAY too big of a departure from tradition for the Academy.
I definitely agree that the success of the character was a sum of the parts, but I still think that Serkis deserves at least an acting nomination based solely on his “part” (snicker). And I can’t imagine the CGI folks not winning a special effects award for their part.
When the CG guys get called up on stage to get their award, I hope they bring Andy Serkis up there too.
Incidentally I do not believe that Two Towers will get (or even be nominated for) the Best Picture award this time, but I do believe that ROTK will, and will get it, in recognition of the whole trilogy. PJ too.
Well, like I said, it’s pretty much only a formality that the CGI team will be nominated for and win a special effects award. I really don’t think that that’s enough recognition though, since its such a slam dunk for them.
Others felt Serkis either needed a new category to be nominated for his work or that he couldn’t get nominated at all in a supporting actor role because he wasn’t actually on-screen. I just suggested that in order to fulfill any requirements for being nominated for an acting award that there should be a co-nomination since the CGI team were integral in creating the visual aspect of Gollum; what appeared on-screen. I think the CGI team deserves more than an obvious special effects award and it makes sense that, as both halves of the character of Gollum, Andy Serkis AND the CGI team should get a nomination for best supporting actor.
I think it would be nice to see Serkis get a nomination, but at the same time, I doubt it will happen, and I don’t think he deserves the Oscar. Daniel Day Lewis as Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York gave, IMHO, the best supporting performance on film last year.
Sure it’s a popularity contest. It’s a measure of popularity among the members of the Academy.
Gollum is completely convincing, but he’s hardly the first convincing CGI character to do that for me. I found the toys in both Toy Story movies to be absolutely convincing.
Talk to Hilary Swank about how much more “popular” she was than Annette Bening and Meryl Streep. I’m sure she would have been surprised to know it before Oscar night.
Ask Roberto Benigni how he got to be more “popular” than Nick Nolte, Edward Norton, Ian McKellen and, oh yes, Tom Hanks.
We all know that Gwyneth Paltrow is more popular than Meryl Streep, and that Frances McDormand is way more popular than Diane Keaton, but who woulda thunk that Juliette Binoche would be more popular than Lauren Bacall? She must have partied a LOT in LA.
For every “well, look at Ron Howard” I can counteract that with a pick that went against the “popularity” proviso. Sometimes, it really is about the performance/film.
It’s a popularity contest! No! It’s an arty-farty thing! No! It’s all politics! No! It’s bought and sold (ask Hilary again how much money was spent to promote her)! No! It’s a floor wax! No! It’s a desert topping!
No, it’s a lot of different people, of a lot of different ages, performing a lot of different occupations within the industry, in a lot of different cities, filling out their ballots one by one and sending them in.
Likely the Sméagol character will accelerate a process to create an award for computer animated characters. This will be needed anyway; like it or not these will appear more and more often in our filmography to portray that which the human body alone cannot. If it gets good enough over the next century, you may never see a totally “live” performance.
With the exception of a few times where the Sméagol character is made to move in a somewhat jerky fashion, I rarely had to work to suspend my disbelief that it was not real. Closeups were especially amazing; where you would normally expect the most difference, you got the least difference: facial expressions and contours.
Much better job of “acting” than having Legolas do a gratuitous slide down the stairs on a shield. ugh.
I’m flummoxed as to why people are having such a problem with that scene. It’s getting nearly as many bitches as Faramir and Elves at HD. Besides being a flat-out and what’s-wrong-with-that COOL moment for Legolas, it made sense for him to get down to the bottom as quickly as possible without making himself a target. I thought it was a pretty good idea, quick and clever thinking by the elfman.
CGI will NEVER replace live actors, unless there’s a plague that sweeps around the world and actors are in very short supply.
George Lucas said that TTT had the best effects he’s ever seen.
Because it’s foreign to the rest of the film. It reminds us that we aren’t really looking through a magic window into the Middle Earth of J.R.R. Tolkien–and that the fellow we’re looking at isn’t really an elf, he’s just a Gen-X’er playing dress-up. It’s jarring, coming at a point where we’re so absorbed in the action, to have our suspension of disbelief yanked out from under us like that.
Plus, if you grew up in a time where it was considered ridiculous for someone to have both a skateboard and pubic hair, it just looks silly.