Unless you'd already gouged out your eyes and tore off your ears after watching Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon (an understandable response), you'll have caught the usual jazz-handed media hysteria that accompanied this week's announcement of the Oscar nominations.
Trend-spotting from across the pond, you can typically guarantee at least one local oddity each year. Moneyball, for instance, which is basically two hours of Brad Pitt chewing food (there's got to be a Tumblr in that), is up for Best Picture. But it's 'about baseball', so always likely to reach fourth base with American voters.
You can also set your Oscars watch by the appearance of at least one high profile article bemoaning the failure of snooty Academy fogies to recognise exemplary work in motion-captured CGI among the acting categories. What this nearly always means, of course, is Andy Serkis. And so it proved again.
This all started after the bendy Brit actor's benchmark-setting turn as the sinister, sinewy Gollum in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. And it continued through King Kong and beyond, with his rousing, rubber-suited romp as Caeser in Rise of The Planet of the Apes gracing cinema screens in 2011.
It fell this time to Wired to ask, "When will a motion-capture actor win an Oscar?" correctly anticipating that Serkis would yet again be snubbed.
Where do video games fit in here? As gamers know, Serkis has also done his bit to further the artistic credentials of the interactive medium, with two powerful gaming performances in recent years: as the savage Kong Bohan in Heavenly Sword, and Monkey (what is it with him and primates?) in Enslaved.
I interviewed Serkis (a more unassuming and downright pleasant movie star it is hard to imagine) before the release of Enslaved, and asked him half-seriously whether an actor would ever collect an Oscar for a video game role.
"Yeah, absolutely," he exclaimed. "I see no reason why not, and I think they should be. The boundaries between storytelling for films and games are disappearing and I'd like to see it invisible.
"I don't think acting in CG roles should be differentiated from live performances. There is no difference." Out-of-touch Academy members, alas, continue sniffily to disagree.
While the prospect of Serkis receiving so much as an Oscar nomination for a CGI movie role, then, remains depressingly distant, this year a video game actor will lift a BAFTA.
Reflecting their increasingly key role in video games, this year's BAFTA Games Awards will honour the best Performer. With parts last year as diverse and memorable as Stephen Merchant in Portal 2 and Nolan North in Uncharted 3, such recognition is long overdue – which is why BAFTA's Games Committee, of which I am a part, gave it the green light.
(The cruel irony in this, I suppose, is that we're a year too late for Serkis and Enslaved.)
Before I'm pilloried for hysterical leaps of logic and faith, yes, yes, I know the very idea of Hollywood recognising video games in this way is plain daft at the moment. As it is, to be fair, in BAFTA's own Film Awards. But it's a start. And, in a happily unintended parallel, this year's Oscar nominations actually help make my point.
The two most-nominated films at the 2012 Academy Awards are The Artist and Hugo. Both are brilliant. But, more relevantly, both are also shamelessly nostalgic celebrations of the history of a medium, The Artist portraying the shift from the silent era to 'talkies', while Hugo wallows in its wide-eyed recollection of the earliest days of the moving image.
A video game equivalent of either movie isn't possible because games haven't been around long enough. Depending on who you listen to, we're either at the talkies stage or the technicolor stage or whatever blah. Either way, it's clear that the art of the interactive moving image remains in its formative years.
That the likes of Serkis revel in the possibilities of a game role only underlines how far gaming has come in its relatively short life.
But if Gollum's word isn't good enough for you, how about a man with a Best Actor Oscar of his own? Speaking to me at last year's Games BAFTAs, Sir Ben Kingsley, who starred in 2010's Fable III, was full of praise for gaming, describing it as: "A very exciting, maturing craft to be involved in".
So while games can do a thousand wonderful things movies never could, I can't help but feel a little gold statue would still make a nice coming-of-age present. Don't you?
Comments
Add a comment