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.
My God, what an incredible actor! I take back everything I said, that brought a tear to my eye. You are a genius, Andy Serkis. A knighthood can’t be far away. Right before she touches him with the sword, I hope the queen scratches her butt, sniffs her finger, and falls off the throne.
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I asked Serkis if he’d be satisfied if they created a new motion-capture honor and he clearly thinks that would be a mistake.
“I firmly believe that it shouldn’t be anything but acting categories because that’s a part of the process that as I say is where the actor alters the performance,” Serkis says. “Visual effects have their own category and animators and visual effects are already accoladed for the work they do on projects like ‘Rise of the Apes’ or ‘Lord of the Rings’ or ‘Avatar’ or ‘King Kong.’ In actual fact what hasn’t been accoladed and was the [key achievement] in ‘Avatar’ or recognized as such [were the motion capture performances] and that’s why I firmly believe that this is no more than acting. It’s an important message. An important message to the acting community that it’s no more than acting because its a tool which enables us actors to play so many different characters and how it is finally manifested onscreen is not really the issue.” [Hitfix]