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Yoda, Gollum Take MTV Awards

zoobaby writes "MTV has given the LoTR franchise credit for spectactular work with Gollum. After being snubbed by the Academy Awards, it is nice to see recognition given to one of the most expressive and best acted roles in recent films."

9 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Gollum sucked by GoatPigSheep · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't know about you guys, but I still don't think CGI is ready for the big time. In every movie it looks so obvious that there was CGI used that it almost ruins the movie for me.

    Even movies from the 80's that used blue screens for everything looked more realistic than today's CGI aided movies, CGI just isn't advanced enough yet to be convincing. You also can't reproduce the human touch of make-up and hand produced costumes you get with using real actors.

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    GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
  2. Bored of the Rings.... by LamerX · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is anyone sick of hearing of Lord of the Rings... Does anyone care that CGI is taking over film, and that nobody is putting effort into special effects anymore? Why I remember back in the day, when it used to be really cool to see stuff, even if it looked a little fake, that was done. Now it's like, "That's too much effort, lets toss some CGI in there for this scene." Same with the Matrix Reloaded, the fight scene with Neo and the Agent Smiths. Obviously they thought that the first movie was cool with the spinny effects (which it was) so they'd better put more spinny effects in there. Only we want to do it really cool without spending a lot of money, so lets just replace the entire scene, actors, backgrounds, etc with computer animation and solve the ingeneuity problem. Yes ingeneuity, figuring out how to make a scene come to life with real people. Something that movies these days are starting to seriously lack.

  3. Gollum as one Actor. by lostchicken · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Some people have said that having Serkis as the actor on scene, the face actor, the expression actor and the voice actor is just a gimmic.

    This is complete rubbish. The reason that Gollum seems as real as he does is because of the connection between voice and motion that you get with every human. It is for this reason that it is always easy to tell when a voice for animation was cast before or after the animation itself was complete.

    If I walked around with somebody else's voice all day, I would seem strange. Hats off to Serkis and the LotR crew for knowing this. Now we can begin to cast by acting talent, not physical attractiveness.

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    -twb
  4. "In recent films" being the key... by mccalli · · Score: 3, Interesting
    it is nice to see recognition given to one of the most expressive and best acted roles in recent films.

    Perhaps, but the definitive Gollum is that voiced by Peter Woodthorpe in the still definitive BBC radio version. Anyone who is interested in The Lord of the Rings, but hasn't heard this version, should really do themselves a favour and check it out.

    Semi-interestingly, Ian Holm, who plays Bilbo in the films, is cast as Frodo here. Co-incidence? I doubt it. I rather suspect that t'old Mr Jackson has heard this version too.

    Cheers,
    Ian

  5. Re:Serkis was Eligible by Kappelmeister · · Score: 3, Interesting

    True; I meant that Serkis was not eligible because he was not nominated, but used the wrong language.

    One thing to keep in mind is that nominations are made only by the respective Academy members. In other words, only actors cast votes for Best Actor (speaking gender-neutrally), only directors cast votes for Best Director, etc. Later, everyone votes on which nominee gets each award. (It doesn't make sense to look too deeply into nomination counts, since there are parallel intenions, but everyone does it anyway.)

    So it's really not shock or mystery why Serkis wasn't nominated. The very segment of the Academy population that was the most resistant to recognizing the work of digital characters -- the actors whose jobs may someday be threatened by them -- was the only one that had any say in the matter!

  6. Yoda speak is Latin, dammit by mr_tenor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I cannot _stand_ people who think Yoda speaks in a fashion that just randomly rearranges words. The times I've watched Star Wars (tm) movies, it's always seemed to me that he speaks in a classical Latin word order

    eg.

    "Strong you are" (Yoda) or whatever, as compared to
    "mangus es" (Romans)

  7. Um.. spoilers by CaptainSuperBoy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's not on the level of the lone gunmen spoiler or anything, but still - nobody has actually seen the awards show, so maybe you should assume that SOME of us want to be surprised? Yeah I know it's been taped already, but it doesn't air until Thursday. Being as not a single Slashdot reader has actually seen the show, this should be posted with a spoiler warning.

  8. Re:Is it really any surprise by SLot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I hope you get modded up, because I think you are right - when Hollywood realizes that they can put more in the bank by not paying the actors - just creating their own via CGI, you will see a paradigm shift. And not a small one - what will People magazine do? Interview the creators?

    This is *so* _Little Heroes_, it's not funny, but I look forward to it.

    (but will the first open source star be stallman?)

  9. Re:Uhm.... by csguy314 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    he won an award for 'best fight scene.' So him spinning around with a lightsabre was what got him that award in the first place. Personally I didn't think that lightsabre scene was as sacreligious as people claim it to be.

    Well I don't know about anyone else, but I always thought it would have been much more interesting if Yoda fought Tyranus by just kinda standing there and controlling his lightsabre with the force.
    Watching Tyranus fight a phantom lightsabre would have been pretty cool, and you'd really know Yoda was a kickass Jedi master....

    this post is off topic...

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    This is left as an exercise for the reader.