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Was Gollum snubbed?

Salon has an article up today that raises the question of whether or not Andy Serkis, the real-life actor who provided much of the performance behind Gollum in The Two Towers, was snubbed by the Academy Awards by not getting a nomination.

While the acting categories are never the most progressive, there have certainly been a handful of flukes, like Anna Paquin's stunned acceptance of her award, or the unusually insightful choice of giving an award to Kim Basinger for her decidedly non-flashy role in L.A. Confidential. But as nice and groundbreaking as it would have been for Serkis to get a nomination, it's hampered by two major problems.

The first, and I hate to say this to those hardcore fans out there, is that it simply wasn't that good of a performance to begin with. Yeah, it was good, and compared to Jar Jar it was practically Hamlet, but was he really that good? I think the underlying acting was better than the CGI exaggerations, but that's part of the performance too, and you can't simply ignore that.

Which raises the second problem: who do you nominate? Andy Serkis may have been "the guy in the suit," as that article points out, but unlike John Hurt in The Elephant Man, there was a great deal of external work that went into it, which the actor had nothing to do with. When you talk about great performances, you have to appreciate the subtle nuances, and the little ticks in expression. Serkis had none of that, because it was all put in by the animators. So even if Gollum was determined to be an Oscar-worthy performance, not only would Serkis be nominated, but so too would every animator who worked to bring that performance to life. And considering how many people worked on that movie...you can see how complicated that would be.

Acting and animating are very similar, yes. But unless there is only one person involved, it no longer qualifies as pure acting, and crosses over into pure animation. In my mind, for a "synthespian" to be nominated in an acting category would require one of two things: either the performance was 100% created by the digital actor via super-sophisticated AI, or the acting was performed entirely by the actor in the motion capture suit, and what we see on the screen is merely the exact same performance only with a different skin. I'm not saying that either one of those won't happen in the future, but it's a little early to start working on those acceptance speeches.

Posted by jason at February 18, 2003 02:42 PM | TrackBack | Read more: Movies , The Oscars