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Maggie is grinning and geeks are winning |
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Written by asap
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Friday, 16 February 2007 |
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Maggie Gyllenhaal can’t contain her glee at being so geekily confounded.
The actress has entered High Ironic mode as she reels off the first of 15 Academy Award winners on stage last weekend at the Science and Technical Oscars ceremony.
“From the late ’70s to the present, the new Brumicro densitometer, and its successor, the Brumagic MPST,” Gyllenhaal says, “have indeed become the densitometers of choice for reading soundtrack negative and positive densities worldwide.”
She giggles loudly. To drive the point home, the 29-year-old tells the crowd of several hundred engineers and computer geeks at the Beverly Hilton hotel: “I’m not sure what half these things mean, and I speak English.”
For better or worse, the Sci-Tech Oscars are most often defined and described by what they are not:
— The achievements they celebrate are not easily understood by laymen, as the regular Oscars are. Beyond the densitometer, there were awards for the industry’s conversion from silver-based to cyan dye analog soundtracks, and for the “Rosetta process for creating digital YCM archival masters.”
— They do not attract celebrities nor the attendant paparazzi. Beyond Gyllenhaal and her fiance Peter Sarsgaard, Ed Begley Jr. was the only other recognizable face in attendance. (In Hollywood, when Mr. Begley is in your Top 3 list of attendees, flashbulbs are few and far between.)
— There are no moving acceptance speeches. The most common bland shout-out was for wives who put up with their award-winning husbands who were clocking long hours at the office. A couple exceptions are detailed below.
— Though there are women in glamorous, scoop-backed dresses, there were only two onstage — Gyllenhaal and Mary Ann Andersen, the only female award winner for her work on the aforementioned cyan dye conversion.
— There is no drama. Winners are named weeks before the ceremony by a special committee. To determine honorees, the committee accepts submissions from the industry and then investigates in a months-long process. And the technology is often not even fresh: Honors go to systems and technologies only after they’ve been either widely adopted or stood the test of time. The open-source special effects file format OpenEXR, for example, was first developed in 1999 at Industrial Light & Magic, the company started by George Lucas. But it didn’t win an award until this year.
— There are no elite entertainers on hand. At last year’s awards, a ventriloquist from Branson, Mo., performed before the dinner and awards presentation — an embarrassingly tacky effort that was the subject of several apologies at this year’s affair. Stand-up comedian Chris Bliss entertained the crowd this time, and ended by juggling tennis balls to the rhythm of an Eric Clapton tune. The quality was better, but still not exactly Oscar-worthy.
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BEST LINES
As at any award ceremony, the most intriguing words were delivered by those who didn’t take themselves too seriously. Joshua Pines of Technicolor Digital Intermediates was honored for his creation of archival separations from digital image data.
When he received his certificate (only one honoree actually took home an Oscar statue), he lifted it with exaggerated effort, saying: “This thing is heavy. They’re right.” And he noted the importance of digital preservation, a hot topic at the ceremony, “so future generations can see our movies — even if they are ’Norbit.”’
Another man, who worked on the Furnace software package for cleaning up grainy or otherwise damaged film images, worked in a geekily sly one-liner. “I’m in Los Angeles receiving an award for the science of dirty pictures,” said Anil Kokaram of The Foundry.
To close the night, the Academy honored Ray Feeney, an innovator in motion control camera systems and special effect software. And as only a veteran of such geek ceremonies can, he smoothly set up the segue to the more well-known Oscars, taking place Feb. 25 in Hollywood.
“The science is in support of the art,” he said. “The art is in support of ideas. And ideas can change the world.”
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asap staff reporter Ryan Pearson also giggles at the word densitometer.
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