When Will a Motion-Capture Actor Win an Oscar?

Extracted 25JAN2012 from http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/01/andy-serkis-oscars/?intcid=story_ribbon

“The acting community has worries about performance capture because they believe it’s some form of replacement for performance when in fact, it’s the opposite,” Serkis, in Los Angeles on break from reprising Gollum in the upcoming Hobbit movies, tells Wired.com in a phone interview. “Performance capture is a tool that allows actors to transform themselves into many different characters. You’re not confined by physicality. You can play anything.”...

Perhaps as a result of the great technological strides made in recent years — and the increasing role that animation is taking in Hollywood — actors, including those who pick Oscar nominees as members of the Academy, are gradually warming up to performance-capture techniques, according to the Screen Actors Guild...

“What we see right now is essentially a collaborative performance,” Furie says, with the actors’ work being heavily supported by other artists. “You can attribute the emotion of the performance to the actor but it still needs to be helped by an animator.”