Aliens, Gollum and talking raccoons: when will the Oscars finally reward mo-cap acting?

Picture the future: it’s the Oscars 2034, and the best actor prizes are no longer split into male and female categories. Instead, there is an award for best performer in a live action role, and another for best actor in a performance capture role. Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks can finally go head-to-head for their epic turns in Sophie’s Choice II and Even Bigger respectively, while Zoe Saldana and Andy Serkis are up for the latter for their startling performances in Avatar 6 and The Lord of the Rings: What Gollum Did Last Summer.

Some might suggest this is a tantalising vision of a world where the Academy has finally caught up with the realities of modern acting. Others would no doubt point out that the Oscars has been rewarding work where the actor’s real face is obscured by makeup, prosthetics, masks, or other transformations for decades, ever since John Hurt received a best actor nod for The Elephant Man in 1980. The difference is that while Robert Downey Jr somehow managed to snag a nomination for playing an Australian method actor donning blackface in the biting 2008 satirical comedy Tropic Thunder, the likes of Avatar’s Saldana and Lord of the Rings’ Serkis seem doomed to Oscars limbo, as they pour their hearts repeatedly into roles only to watch awards season roll by like an indifferent Na’vi riding a banshee past a crying Jake Sully.

Saldana, in the Oscars mix for her turn in Jacques Audiard’s new film Emilia Pérez, told the Independent it was “deflating” to see her motion-capture performances dismissed, even as she understands the systemic snobbery at play. “Old habits die hard, and when you have old establishments, it’s really hard to bring forward change,” she said. “And I understand that, so I’m not bitter about it, but it is quite deflating when you give 120% of yourself into something. I mean, not winning is OK, not being nominated is OK, but when you’re overlooked and then minimised and completely disregarded …”

Saldana hinted that Academy members might be listening too hard to those who suggest that mo-cap performances are really the shared vision of the actors underneath all those dots, and technicians tweaking in post-production. “I know the difference between that and what we did,” she said. “At some point you have to ask yourself: ‘Why is it that I do what I do? Is it so others can give me approval? Or is it because I don’t want to do anything else?’”

There is a continuing conversation around rewarding mo-cap roles. Avatar director James Cameron has been calling for recognition for years, while Serkis (who has also played impressive mo-cap characters in the Planet of the Apes remake series as well as others films) has spoken of his hope that one day, the essence of a great performance will no longer “just have to mean seeing an actor’s face on screen”.

The idea that the Academy might create a separate category to reward such performances does of course seem far-fetched. What next? An award for best achievement in de-ageing or best post-credit scene? But the reality is that there are only going to be more aliens, fantasy homunculi and hyperrealistic talking raccoons on our screen as the years go by. Despite the naysayers, Avatar: The Way of Water took more than $2bn at the global box office, while Disney recently became the only Hollywood studio to hit $2bn in 2024, thanks in large part to the supposedly ailing Marvel films. If the Academy can’t get its collective head around these kind of performances, another awards body with greater vision will eventually take the glory for doing so instead.

What exactly is the problem here? Does wearing fake teeth or enduring a 14-hour makeup session somehow represent the peak of artistic achievement, while pouring your soul into a performance that’s later mapped on to a 9ft blue alien is dismissed as glorified puppeteering? Does this explain why Saldana’s Neytiri is relegated to a “technical” category while some actor in a biopic nobody saw wins for managing to look sad in sepia tones?

The real issue here is a misunderstanding of what acting actually is. Saldana’s work in Avatar isn’t diminished because it’s rendered in zeroes and ones. If anything, it is elevated. Acting isn’t about the materials: it’s about the performance, the emotional resonance, the ability to make us feel something real; this is something we can only imagine the late Hurt and his director David Lynch understood very well. To dismiss this work is like sneering at a symphony because the conductor didn’t carve the violin, or refusing to applaud a trapeze artist because they used a safety net instead of leaping blindly into the abyss.