RENDERED RECOGNITION
DOES SERKIS RATE OSCAR CONSIDERATION FOR HIS MOTION- CAPTURE WORK?
Andy Serkis wants an Oscar. Well, of course he does. What actor worth his salt doesn’t covet filmdom’s highest accolade? And Serkis is certainly worth his salt.
You’ve seen him in movies. Except maybe y ou haven’t.
Serkis is the king of motion-capture, in which actors wear special suits that allow performances to be “captured” and digitized. This let him play tiny, wizened Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy; a towering ape in 2005’s King Kong; and Supreme Leader Snoke in The Force Awakens. His latest role is a return as the chimpanzee general Caesar in War for the Planet of the Apes.
Each performance (well, maybe not Snoke) has led to calls that the man deserves an Oscar nomination, or at least a special citation. But so far it hasn’t happened. The argument for — and it’s one Serkis understandably stokes — is that his is a performance like any other. We celebrate actors who perform in prosthetics and makeup; Serkis says his technique involves “digital makeup” over an existing performance.
But does it? The opposing view from the visual effects boffins ( and it’s growing more strident) is that there’s a lot more going on in Caesar’s performance than what Serkis brings to it. A recent Variety article quotes Apes’ director Matt Reeves: “We’d have them side- by- side,” he says, referring to the raw footage and the digital version. “I’d say, ‘Andy’s angry here, and we have that, but he’s also sad and I’m not seeing that yet.’”
It’s a complicated equation. Traditional effects — editing, lighting, sets and costumes, practical and digital effects — can ruin a so- so performance or make a good one better, but they can’t turn straw into gold. With an all- digital rendering like Caesar, that becomes technically possible. I’m not suggesting Serkis is a bad actor — why continue to hire him if he’s no good? — but if we can’t know precisely where his genius ends and that of the animators begins, then how do we award each for the result?
The solution taken by the MTV Movie Awards is a prize for best virtual performance, but the results can play like a cruel joke. Serkis won in its first year for playing Gollum in The Two Towers, but look who he was up against — Yoda, Kangaroo Jack, Scooby Doo and Dobby the House Elf from Harry Potter; no wonder he won. He lost out the only other time the award was given, last year, when Amy Poehler took the prize for her character in Inside Out, which was traditional voice work with some motion capture to augment the look of some scenes.
Filmmaking continues to evolve, and no doubt the lines between real and digital performances will further blur; witness the recent reincarnation of the late Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Or look back 17 years to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, during which Oliver Reed died of a heart attack, and a body- double was combined with his computer-generated features to complete several scenes. “He gave an inspiring, moving performance,” said effects supervisor John Nelson at the time. “All we did was help him finish it.”
Serkis is alive and well, but perhaps the same division of labour applies to his turn as Caesar. It’s a stunning performance, but it doesn’t reside solely in the realm of acting. For now, the work will have to be its own reward.