Avatar's actors snubbed by Oscars and James Cameron blames himself

Avatar's actors snubbed by Oscars and James Cameron blames himself
Avatar actors - The cast of "Avatar" is feeling blue.

The box-office behemoth may have gotten nine Academy Award nominations this week, but none were for its actors - and "Avatar" director James Cameron thinks the Oscar snub is totally unfair.

"People confuse what we have done with animation," Cameron told The Hollywood Reporter. "It's nothing like animation. The creator here is the actor, not the unseen hand of an animator."

Leading technology

Technical facts:

1,852 total shot count
1,818 animated shots
Close to 900 crew working on Avatar at peak
Some of the bigger shots include more than 1,000 digital assets, excluding characters
More than 1,900 digital assets were offi cially approved
Some of the larger shots use between 5-50 billion polygons
Roughly 10TB of data was generated per day
There are 483 hero plant assets with geometry modifications and different textures there were 3,000 possible variations to use
53 different hero Na’vi models with over a hundred possible variations
25 hero vehicles assets
21 hero creatures – when combined with texture variations gave a total of 68 unique creatures
Approximately 90 unique environments and 1,500 shot-specific terrain pieces or elements that make up these environments
4,352 render machines
34,816 CPU cores
104TB of RAM

Avatar's actors snubbed by Oscars and James Cameron blames himself

Avatar actor; More than 15 years in the making, "Avatar" used groundbreaking CGI technology to tell the tale of a futuristic conflict between humans and the blue-skinned Na'vi tribe of Pandora, including an innovative method of capturing the actors' facial expressions.

But Cameron's hi-tech wizardry apparently put off Oscar voters who, Cameron believes, didn't consider the film's performances to be actual "acting."

"We made a commitment to our actors that what they would see up on the screen were their performances, not somebody else's interpretation of what their performance might or might not be," said "Avatar" producer Jon Landau.

Despite the Oscar dis, one movie expert believes "Avatar" may also be breaking new ground in the way people look at acting from now on.

"This is very much the first film of the 21st century," film professor Richard Brown told The Hollywood Reporter. "What we need to do is expand our concept of what the word 'actor' means. It's unfair to take performances as good as these and not designate them as actors."
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