Practicalmadness

Dave Kehr writes in the Old Gray Lady today about the Academy's slowness in picking up on the digital revolution, which starts to sound like a think piece about the abortive attempt by New Line Cinema to get an Oscar nomination for Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Though Mr. Serkis ultimately wasn't nominated, the academy announced that his work would indeed be eligible in the supporting-actor category.

So would that make the lovable talking mouse who starred in "Stuart Little 2" eligible as well? Apparently not. Although the academy has remained silent on this central issue, their guidelines suggest that having a human armature is essential to being considered for an acting prize. Because there was no motion-capture model for Stuart Little (the figure was composed out of geometric shapes on the computer screen), Stuart is deemed a fiction, while Gollum is ruled a performance. And so, despite the preponderance of live actors and location shooting in "Stuart Little 2," the film was shuffled off to the animation category, where it failed to win a place on the final ballot.

But being fictional is not, in and of itself, a reason to be barred from Oscar consideration. Ask Donald Kaufman (or try to). The fictional twin brother of the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, Donald is credited as the co-writer of "Adaptation," and his name will appear alongside Charlie's on any statuettes that might come his way (although the academy, willing to play along with the joke only so far, has also announced that should Mr. Kaufman win, only one statuette will be awarded).

I don't know about you, but this sounds like the Academy is extremely savvy to the advent of digital characters and postmodern billing. If indeed Gollum would have been eligible for an acting Oscar, even if he didn't end up nominated (which is simply a matter of popular vote -- the public speculation over whether Serkis could be nominated probably hurt him, but ultimately wouldn't have changed anything), that's a more progressive viewpoint than I would have expected.

Academy rules specify that 75 percent of a film must use animated effects for it to qualify for the animation category. That's a condition that "The Two Towers" almost certainly fulfills (not that I've seen it with a stopwatch in hand), given the ubiquity of animated supporting characters, digitally retouched photography and vast castles, caverns and fantasy landscapes spun entirely out of pixels. But no. "The Two Towers" is real; "Ice Age" (which uses the same technology to create its backgrounds, and which was nominated this year for animated feature) is not.

Actually, Dave, The Two Towers is largely real. Even some of the more unbelievable landscapes were achieved by compositing real elements, and 'digital grading' (the digital tinting process used to give the film its often unnecessarily blue look) does not make for an animated film. It has, in fact, been used on many films in the past and nobody else would question their realness, even if Elijah Wood does give us all our doubts.

Speaking of "Gangs of New York," Martin Scorsese's film will probably prove to be one of the last historical spectacles to be filmed entirely on built sets.

Well, this is just stupid. True, Scorsese could probably have saved some cash, but it wouldn't have been the same for Scorsese, the actors or the finished product. Day-Lewis, DiCaprio and company would have been acting in front of a blue screen, and it would have showed -- assuming, of course, they would still have even agreed to do the movie. The millions spent made for a better movie.

And The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Kehr's current poster child for digital cinema, was mostly filmed on real landscapes or built sets. Even the bigger things which could not have been built to scale were done as models, so that there would be some feeling of realness to them.

Kehr's musings on the future of art direction ignore the key fact that Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace -- which was filmed on as many digital sets as its recent sequel, Attack of the Clones -- was nominated for an art direction Oscar. Digital sets are considered traditional art direction -- the precedent for this has been set.