If they gave an Oscar for Things I Wish People Would Shut the Hell Up About, Andy Serkis’s performance in Rise of the Planet of the Apes would win in a landslide. Naturally, Fox is busy pouring gasoline on the fire, releasing three CG-free clips of Andy Serkis in ROTPOTA to build Oscar buzz in advance of tomorrow’s next Tuesday’s nominations, and to back up James Franco’s “Andy Serkis is the Che Guevara of Chimps” article from last week. First of all, acting like a chimp isn’t hard, no matter how many times you say it is. He had one line, and the rest was grunting. Channing Tatum doesn’t win awards for that and neither should Andy Serkis. Secondly, asking people to consider performance capture against regular acting is like someone on American Idol getting to use autotune. You can swear you hit the notes all you want, the point is, there’s no way for us to tell.

Check out Andy Serkis’s incredible chimp acting below.
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YOU ARE A MONKEY, DEREK!

I think most of us could already predict this was coming based on how furiously everyone was jacking each other off over motion-capture when Rise of the Planet of the Apes came out over the summer. Now it’s official: Fox is pushing hard for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Andy Serkis’s performance as Caesar the ape. I’m all for it, but only if he has to give his acceptance speech using the talking sign language glove from Congo.

Fox will push to create momentum for a possible best supporting actor Oscar nomination for Andy Serkis for his performance as ape Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Fox Filmed Entertainment co-chairman and CEO Tom Rothman said here Monday night.
“I think we may be at the place where we will see a first-ever in Hollywood this year, which is to see Andy Serkis get nominated for a best supporting actor for Planet of the Apes, even though his face never actually appears,” he told The Hollywood Reporter at the Gotham Independent Film Awards at Cipriani Wall Street when asked about Fox’s contenders for awards season. “But his performance appears, so we are going to push that hard.”
Further discussing Serkis’ work Rothman said: “The emotionality – what you see and what you feel – he did it. I saw him. I watched him. Then they digitally overlaid – you can think of it as a costume – the skin and the hair of an ape.”

“He BECAME Caesar the ape. It was incredible to watch. He refused to break character for the entire shoot. I saw him hurl his own feces at a PA who messed up his Starbucks order once. What an incredible artist.”

“…But I tell you the thing that people felt – and a lot of people where moved when they saw the movie – is because of his performance.” [THR]

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We’ve been hearing about The Adventures of TinTin: Secret of the Unicorn (directed by Steven Spielberg, produced by Peter Jackson) for what feels like decades, and finally, the first teaser is here.  Based on the beloved Belgian comic strip I’d never heard of before this, the 3D, motion-capture project “stars” Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jamie Bell, and Cary Elwes.  As far as I’m concerned, the most interesting thing about it is that Edgar Wright co-wrote the script (with Steven Moffat and Joe Cornish).  Seriously, did you guys see Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s last movies?  Anyway, now that the first footage is here, it sure looks… uh… motion-capturey.  Although it may have broken the record for most dramatic music ever set to footage of a guy staring at a toy boat.

[HD Available at Apple]

Here’s Jackson’s explanation for using motion-capture to Empire Magazine back in November:

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Word came down to /Film yesterday from a supposedly reliable source that the Green Lantern suit in the Martin Campbell/Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern movie, aka Touched By An Alien, would be almost wholly computer generated.  Meanwhile, Ryan Reynolds’ abs will still made of rainbows and puppy kisses.

The suit that Ryan wears on set is a grey tracking motion/performance capture suit with LED lights. The Green Lantern suit you will see in the final film will be almost entirely created using computers.

Ngila Dickson, the costumer designer on the film who previously won an Academy Award for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, was tasked with trying to find a way to do something that stands apart from all of the other superheroes spandex suit designs we’ve seen in the past.  The Green Lantern suit is something that should look alien — it needs to seem other worldly. It encompasses any creature that wears the ring, and Hal Jordan is the first human to ever wear the suit. [ /Film]

The nerds are probably going to be a sea of agitated man-boobs over this one, and I’m not a fan of motion-capture or CGI costumes either — they almost never look good as well-done real-world effects — but if this movie turns out lame (and there’s a pretty good chance of that), it won’t be because of this in and of itself.  There was plenty of CG in Spider-Man (and yeah, a lot of it looked pretty lame), but there was also Dr. Octopus in Spider-Man 2, and he’s probably my favorite part of any comic-book movie.  Plus, it just makes sense that an alien would come from outer space to put a ring on Ryan Reynolds and make him get dressed in front of a computer. Hey, instead of CG, did anyone consider putting him in a costume that’s mostly KY?  That could be cool.  The bad guys would have trouble grabbing onto him because he’d be so slippery, and then they’d probably giggle a lot.

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In between rounds of patting themselves on the back, becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time, getting sucked off by critics, and driving nerds to suicide, James Cameron and the producers of Avatar apparently found time to whine that none of their actors got nominated for Academy Awards.

“People confuse what we have done with animation,” director James Cameron said at the recent Producers Guild Awards.  “It’s nothing like animation. The creator here is the actor, not the unseen hand of an animator.”

The Oscars snub is “a disappointment,” said producer Jon Landau, “but I blame ourselves for not educating people in the right way.” Landau explained that they needed to make clear that the system they used represents a new way to use “motion capture” photography, or as Landau puts it, “emotion capture.” [*facepaw*] “We made a commitment to our actors that what they would see up on the screen were their performances,” Landau said, “not somebody else’s interpretation of what their performance might be.”

The issue of what makes an actor an actor first surfaced when Andy Serkis did Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings,” but skepticism remains over whether it is the same as live-action acting.
“What an actor is doing when acting is not just looking like something but expressing something going on inside,” says James Lipton, host of Bravo’s “Inside the Actor’s Studio.” “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.”

Film professor Richard Brown [hehe, "dick brown"] doesn’t agree. “This is very much the first film of the 21st century,” Brown said. “What we need to do is expand our concept of what the word actor means. It’s unfair to take performances as good as these and not designate them as actors.” [THR]

I’d love to weigh in on this, but seeing as how I just awarded my Japanese sex robot a coffee mug that says “World’s Greatest Sexbot,” I might be a little biased.  I also think a guy playing an American who still has an Australian accent maybe doesn’t deserve consideration for acting’s highest honor.  But what do I know, I’m just a guy who loves sexbots.