What Oscar Noms Got Right (Mad As Hell Op-Ed Piece)

Ahhh yes leave it up to James Cameron to make a billion dollars, and still be whining about something. Sci Fi Wire has it that the Academy has been criticized by James Cameron and his lackey producer for not nominating Zoe Saldana for a best actress award. My response to this is…REALLY????? As an actor I find this disturbing. James Cameron was quoted as saying “People confuse what we have done with animation…It’s nothing like animation. The creator here is the actor, not the unseen hand of an animator.” No I’m sorry it’s not it doesn’t matter if they were wearing the funny suits.An actor’s performance is a real thing subject to editing only in the way that the director picks which real performance the director liked. Not the one that was run over by a computer operator. They went on to say “We made a commitment to our actors that what they would see up on the screen were their performances,” Fine we saw a blue computer animated figure with the emotion that the computer animator enhanced. You can’t get the emotion that the actor is feeling with a computer. No matter what they tell you. They event went as far to say they should have called it “emotion capture”.

I think that’s what offends me the most, the idea that they think a performance is found in the facial tics and body language. What about those amazing things called eyes? A good actor shows it in their movements. A great actor shows that they really believe it in their eyes. That in my opinion can’t be replicated by a computer. The article goes on to include the input of one Mr. Actors Studio himself James Lipton. “What an actor is doing when acting is not just looking like something but expressing something going on inside,” he said. “I’m not sure that motion capture, while it captures the flicker of an eyebrow, the twist of a mouth, a gesture of a hand, equally captures emotion.” I agree anything that’s done with a computer has the slim chance of being improved or tampered with. Meryl Streep doesn’t get a team of computer animators, she does it live. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

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