Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - Grading & Discussion

At this point, they should just give Serkis an achievement award.

 

^ It'll happen some day. I don't see any rush. I'm sure Serkis isn't hurting for respect and admiration from those in his actual life.

 

- Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
- Andy Serkis as Caesar in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
- Toby Kebbel as Koba in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
- Vin Diesel as Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy
- Bradley Cooper (voice) and Sean Gunn (MoCap) as Rocket in Guardians of the Galaxy
- Matt Cross and Lee Ross for Godzilla and the MUTOs in Godzilla (apparently Andy Serkis also consulted on that and acted as Godzilla's eyes, so toss in another one for him if that qualifies)
- I didn't see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but whoever the actors were in that

Obviously in each of those cases it shouldn't be just the MoCap actor receiving the award but also the entire digital effects team that brought the character to life.

If you want to expand the nomination pool even further, you could also include exceptional performances by actors who do purely voiceover work in the film but are not seen onscreen. For instance, Scarlett Johansson's performance in Her or Douglas Rain's performance as HAL in 2001 or any of the dozens of major animated film voiceover actors each year that are fully fleshed out characters who are indispensable to the film.

 

The film was good, though I got a little bored about halfway through. If they would have trimmed about 15-20 minutes of the film, I think I would have liked it more. As it is, it's still a solid entry in the Apes saga, but for now I still like the first one the best.

 

Groot and Rocket were not MoCap, but animated from scratch. Diesel & Cooper only did the voices. (Gunn actually tweeted about this today: https://twitter.com/JamesGunn/status/551125626929688576)
"Desolation of Smaug" was not in 2014 - Smaug was barely in 2014's final Hobbit movie.
The only MoCap perfomances this year that lasted more than a few minutes were the Apes characters and the Ninja Turtles. And I doubt anybody wants to hand out Oscar noms to TMNT.

 

That's not entirely accurate. Both characters did have on-set stand-ins for the actors to play off and the animators to use as reference. Their moves may not have been directly captured, but the animators presumably did draw on their performances to some extent.

(This is a practice that goes back a long while. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, actress Betsy Brantley was the on-set double for Jessica Rabbit, acting out her physical interactions with human characters and real objects, and then getting animated over/edited out. They often had to use split screens, because Jessica's waist was too narrow to conceal Brantley's body; so one side of a shot would be Jessica's hands animated over Brantley's hands, and the other side would be Jessica's body animated over an empty background shot from the same angle.)

 

^ Alright, "from scratch" may not have been the most fitting choice of words, but those performances presumably still wouldn't qualify for a hypothetical "performance capture" Oscar, unless one were ready to allow any animated performance that is in some way based on live-action reference footage (which a lot of character animation is, actually).

 

I think my point still stands that you could find enough nominees to fill out a category if they created one, and it's deserving of recognition. Plus, I'm pretty sure I've seen technical categories at the Oscar's with fewer than five nominees before. But even if it has to be five, you could easily fill it with more people from PotA, like Karin Konoval's excellent performance as Maurice the orangutan. I'm also sure there's a lot of performances I missed because I didn't see the films or forgot.

 

There could indeed be an award for "non-human character of the year" rather than a more narrowly defined "motion capture performance of the year", but that's the flavor of category one finds in an MTV Movie or People's Choice Awards rather than the Oscars - not judging, just observing. Characters like Groot are skillfully and artistically made, but the Academy is simply not going to call it the equal of actors performing at the top of their craft. We can cry about that all we like, but it's the way it is.

 

In the Hobbit films Azog and Bolg were also motion-capture.

 

Azog and Bolg were really good looking too. I would forget they were digital because they looked so textured and real and three dimensional. I remember one scene where one of them is holding someone down while they stab them, and the camera is staying on his hand in an extreme close up, and it absolutely looks like a real person's hand with hairs and lines and creases...

 

There's that Gaith condescension and conflation of opinion with facts we all know and love.

 

Gaith makes a lot of sense to me...

 

Does it? A bunch were mentioned, of which several were vetoed, and the remaining ones are a mixed bag. It sounds more like there are enough to nominate just because they exist as opposed to actually being deserving of an award.

"...And the nominees are:
Andy Serkis for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
Toby Kebbell for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
Terry Notary for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
Karin Konoval for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
And whoever was in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles..."

 

Hey, I'd be in favor of said category... but if you think the body that called Crash its year's Best Picture is going to create a category apart from visual effects in which virtually every nomination will be a dragon or alien or mutated turtle, it's not condescension to observe that you're simply wrong on that count. As Gene Siskel said, "There is a point when a personal opinion shades off into an error of fact."

 

Awards are more about popularity among the voting pool than actual quality, and winning an award often comes down more to whether you have good publicity among the voters than whether your work is exemplary. That's why I long since stopped caring much about awards. Maybe the folks who do get awards are generally deserving, but a ton of other deserving or even superior artists get overlooked.

 

..ala Life of Pi

 

Of those vetoed, I simply chose the wrong Hobbit movie. Cucumberpatch would be eligible for Battle of the Five Armies, as well as the subsequent mentions of Azog and Bolg. Gunn still was the animator and actor stand-in guide for Rocket, and another actor for Groot, with Cooper and Diesel providing the voices, so it's essentially a slightly less sophisticated version of the same principle. And my lack of interest and awareness in seeing the TMNT movie or looking it up at the time of posting doesn't mean the actors gave a poor performance.

It's my understanding from an article I read a while back that they actually advanced the MoCap technique for TMNT, which was what made me suggest it even though I didn't care to see the film. Because I don't see this as solely a new acting category, but a unique combination of acting, vocal, choreography (to a lesser extent) performances, and VFX animation, I don't think one can just dismiss it based on how significant or not you consider the actor's individual performance. You have to take its significance as a whole.

Even though I believe I covered your parameters for five performances of note (giving more than five to cover the vetoes and some additional possibilities from PotA or the possible inclusion of other types of performances; like voiceovers into a broader "virtual/offscreen performance" category), as I said, in the technical categories they often given out fewer than five nominations at a time (Makeup is three), so if you don't consider all of those worthy, it could be whittled down to three nominees instead. But I think it shouldn't really be hard to find five per year since it would be professionals in the industry making the suggestions rather than my offhand recall as a layman.

You mean like how the Academy created the dedicated Best Makeup category under pressure to recognize The Elephant Man in 1981? A category which has resulted in nominations for aliens and sasquatch and werewolves and apes? They recognized that they were behind the times on recognizing the achievements of artists like Stan Winston and Rick Baker and responded to insider and fan pressure to change. Similar pressure is being applied due to the lack of acknowledgement of the achievements of Any Serkis and the performances in PotA among others, and the Academy is again behind the times in recognizing a new technology and type of performance.

You're treating it like an affront to traditional acting categories, but there's no reason it has to be. Since it's a team effort with contributions in equal measure by the physical and/or vocal performer and the VFX team, it's more of a hybrid category falling somewhere between the technical and acting categories than strictly one or the other.

Anyway, no one's "crying" about this, and it's dismissive to say that. They just feel that the Oscars are behind the times on this and good performances are not being recognized because it doesn't fit traditional acting roles.

 

...you have a very reasonable and articulate point of view, sir!

...however, i'm still not sure i see the point

 

Andy Serkis deserves the Precious.