Show host Ellen DeGeneres wears a fairy costume while on stage at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Lucy Nicholson
Singer Lorna Luft (L), her brother Joey Luft and her half-sister Liza Minnelli (R) arrive at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Lucas Jackson
John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, arrives with his wife Nancy at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Lucas Jackson
Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron, best director nominee for his film "Gravity," and his partner Sheherazade Goldsmith arrive at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Lucas Jackson
Producers Albert Berger (L) and Ron Yerxa (R) pose with screenwriter Bob Nelson from the film "Nebraska" arrive at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Mike Blake
Bruce Dern, best actor nominee for his role in "Nebraska", and his wife Andrea Beckett (R) and daughter Laura Dern arrives at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Lucas Jackson
"American Hustle" producers Richard Suckle (L) and Charles Roven arrive at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Mike Blake
Actor Samuel L. Jackson (L) and best actor nominee Leonardo DiCaprio chat before the show at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Lucy Nicholson
Presenter and actor Harrison Ford and his wife actress Calista Flockhart arrive at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Adrees Latif
Jared Leto, best supporting actor nominee for his role in "Dallas Buyers Club", and his mother Constance Leto and brother Shannon (R) arrive at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Lucas Jackson
Lupita Nyong'o, best supporting actress nominee for her role in "12 Years a Slave," wearing a Fred Leighton headband and Prada gown, arrives with actress Alfre Woodard (R) at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Lucas Jackson
Matthew McConaughey, best actor nominee for his role in "Dallas Buyers Club", and his wife Camila Alves McConaughey and mother Mary Kathleen McCabe pose at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Lucas Jackson
Actors Emma Watson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt present the award for visual effects at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Lucy Nicholson
Actor Stacy Keach, from the film "Nebraska," and his wife Malgosia (R) arrive at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Adrees Latif
The Edge, Bono, Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton (L-R) of the band U2 arrive at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Lucas Jackson
Sandra Bullock, best actress nominee for her role in "Gravity," wearing a navy Alexander McQueen gown with Lorraine Schwartz jewels, arrives at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Lucas Jackson
Meryl Streep, best actress nominee for her role in "August: Osage County", and her husband Don Gummer arrive at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Lucas Jackson
Actress Charlize Theron and her mother Gerda Jacoba Aletta Maritz (L) arrive at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Adrees Latif
Best supporting actor nomineee Jonah Hill of the film "The Wolf of Wall Street" arrives with his mother Sharon Lyn Chalkin at the 86th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 2, 2014.
Photo by Adrees Latif
Actress and evening co-host Kristen Bell poses before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual Scientific and Technical Awards on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Photo by Chris Pizzello
This year’s Scientific & Technical Academy Awards featured an unusually large number of honorees — 52 individuals representing 19 technical achievements, plus career honorees — but it also summed up the digital revolution that has swept through the filmed entertainment industry
On the one hand, an Academy Award of Merit (that is, an actual Oscar statutette) was awarded “to all those who built and operated film laboratories, for over a century of service to the motion picture industry.” It’s the first time the Acad has ever given an Oscar to a large group of people, and an unprecedented salute to a segment of the film biz that is passing into history.
The Award of Merit is reserved for achievements that have stood the test of time, and the vanishing photochemical crafts certainly have done that, but more than a dozen Academy certificates and plaque were given to more recent innovations, most of them digital filmmaking tools.
The Academy Award of Merit Oscar is somewhat rare, and not all those who planned the awards were convinced the presentation of such an award at the Sci-Tech banquet was the appropriate place to salute the contributions of labs. But the decision sends a signal. David Reisner, secretary of the American Society of Cinematographers technology committee and himself a recipient of an Academy Certificate this year, told Variety ”This (unofficially!) acknowledges the death of film and its replacement by digital. It’s kind of a big deal.”
But Christopher Nolan, who surprised the gathering at the Beverly Hills Hotel to present this Oscar, voiced a different view. calling the processing of photochemical film “the technology that lies at the heart of filmmaking and still represents the gold standard of film technology.”
Nolan, a champion of film for capture and exhibition, announced this Oscar will be on display at the Acad’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills until the new Academy Museum is completed. “Where it will be on permanent display as a reminder to future generations of the fine work of all of these men and women.”
By the time Nolan spoke, though, the evening had already shown both sides of the digital divide, with some barbs thrown at digital tech along with the awards for it.
The first three awards were for mechanical innovations: the pneumatic car flipper and two helicopter-camera combos. Then began the software awards, starting with ASC Color Decision List technology, which Reisner received with Joshua Pines, Lou Levinson, Curtis Clark and David Register.
Technicolor’s Pines explained their innovation by reminding the gathering that in the days of film, paper tape was used to record the decisions made in color timing and the look of a shot or sequence. ”D.p’s complained they didn’t have a way to consistently describe their looks as things went downhill — I mean, went digital,” quipped Pines. Hence the need for the ASC Color Decision List.
Pines had started off saying “It is an honor to be competing at the Winter Olympics for geeks” and added “I’d like to thank the Academy for giving us only 45 seconds each,” a limit that was often broken over the evening. He got so many laughs that when he and his fellow ASC CDL honorees left the stage, co-host Kristen Bell went off-script to quip “I’m going to quit acting and work with those guys.”
Bell and Michael B. Jordan handled hosting duties gracefully, and for once it was the diversity of honorees’ names, not the jargon needed to describe their achievements, that tripped up the thesps as they read from the teleprompter.
Awards sent to achievements from several of major visual effects and animation studios: Industrial light & Magic’s Zeno framework and Plume system; Deep Compositing and Spherical Harmonic Lighting System tech from Weta Digital; Sony Imageworks Open Color IO; DreamWorks Animation’s Flux; and Rhythm and Hues Studio’s Voodoo.
The acceptance by Rhythm & Hues vets was especially emotional. Hans Rijpkema thanked R&H founder John Hughes “for creating a community spirit that made us do better work and made us better people.” Perry did not have to mention that R&H went bankrupt before winning the vfx Oscar last year for “Life of Pi” and what’s left of the company no longer has anything resembling the spirit Hughes built there.
Another highlight came when Ofer Alon accepted his award for Z-Brush digital model software. Alon methodically took out his cell phone and took a selfie at the podium.
As usual, many of the honorees admitted they’d never imagined getting an Academy Award for the academic and technical. One made a point of reminding his wife he was keeping a promise he’d made 17 years earlier when she’d said, “If you ever get an Academy Award, mention me in your speech.” Eric Veach, who did basic reasearch that led to deep shadowing technology, said at the podium “This means (my wife) can’t make fun of my thesis anymore.”
And ILM’s Dan Piponi, one of the honorees for ILM’s Plume system for rendering fire, smoke and explosions, spoke for many when he said: “When I was a kid, nobody told me that if I wanted an Academy Award, I should study mathematics, but that’s what I did and here I am.”
Richard Edlund (L-R), Michael B. Jordan, Kristen Bell and Dawn Hudson attend The Oscars Scientific and Technical Awards Ceremony in Beverly Hills, California February 15, 2014.
Photo by Phil McCarten
Philip George, left, and Gifford Hooper, developers of the Helicam miniature helicopter camera system and recipients of Technical Achievement Awards, pose together at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual Scientific and Technical Awards on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Photo by Chris Pizzello
Jeremy Selan, developer of the OpenColorIO color management framework and recipient of a Technical Achievement Award, poses at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual Scientific and Technical Awards on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Photo by Chris Pizzello
Left to right, Tibor Madjar, Csaba Kohegyi, Andre Camenisch and David Cardwell, responsible for the design and implementation of Mudbox software and recipients of a Technical Achievement Award, pose together at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual Scientific and Technical Awards on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Photo by Chris Pizzello
The scientists and inventors who make big-screen superheroes, spectacular explosions and other only-in-the-movies effects possible have their own Oscar ceremony.
Kristen Bell and Michael B. Jordan hosted the film academy's Scientific and Technical Awards Saturday at the Beverly Hills Hotel, recognizing more than 50 of the most creative scientists and engineers in the movie business.
These are the men who developed the computer technology behind the bullet scene in "The Matrix" and the animation techniques in "Life of Pi." They're the visionaries who build the things the film industry needs that don't yet exist, like advanced remote helicopter cameras and the Pneumatic Car Flipper (which does what it sounds like), for which they received certificates and plaques from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
One honoree, Joshua Pines, who helped develop image-processing mathematics to standardize color, called the evening "this year's annual winter Olympics for geeks."
The two Oscar statuettes were presented among the night's 21 awards: The Gordon E. Sawyer Award to Peter W. Anderson for his contributions to 3-D technology, and an Academy Award of Merit in honor of the countless owners and operators of film-processing labs over the past century. "The Dark Knight" writer-director Christopher Nolan accepted the film lab Oscar, which will be on permanent display at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles when it opens in 2017.
He also contributed to the film-versus-digital debate that other honorees nudged at during the night.
Film is "the technology that lies at the heart of filmmaking," Nolan said, "and still represents the gold standard in imaging technology."
Still, the majority of Saturday's awards honored research and inventions related to digital filmmaking.
Eric Veach was recognized for his Stanford doctoral thesis that incorporates the physics of lighting into computer graphics. Dan Piponi, part of a team who created a system to simulate smoke and fire first used in films such as "Avatar" and "Puss In Boots," joked about his unlikely road to Oscar recognition.
Bell said she learned new scientific concepts and vocabulary as she prepared for the show, adding she was happy to help honor the artists deep behind the scenes.
The rest of this year's Academy Awards will be presented March 2.
Left to right, Lou Levinson, David Reisner, Joshua Pines, Curtis Clark, ASC, and David Register, developers of the American Society of Cinematographers' Color Decision List technology and recipients of a Technical Achievement Award, pose together at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual Scientific and Technical Awards on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Photo by Chris Pizzello
Left to right, Dan Piponi, Olivier Maury and Ian Sachs, creators of the ILM Plume system that simulates and renders fire, smoke and explosions for motion picture visual effects and recipients of a Technical Achievement Award, pose together at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual Scientific and Technical Awards on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Photo by Chris Pizzello
Left to right, Robert Lanciault, Andre Gauthier, Benoit Sevigny and Yves Boudreault, designers of the FILMBOX software application and recipients of a Scientific and Engineering Award, pose together at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual Scientific and Technical Awards on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Photo by Chris Pizzello
Left to right, Jan Sperling, Emmanuel Prevenaire, Etienne Brandt and Tony Postiau, developers of the Flying-Cam SARAH 3.0 system and recipients of a Scientific and Engineering Award, pose together at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual Scientific and Technical Awards on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Photo by Chris Pizzello
Post-production and distribution executive Charles "Tad" Marburg, left, recipient of the John A. Bonner Medal of Commendation, and visual effects supervisor and director of photography Peter W. Anderson, recipient of the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, pose together before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual Scientific and Technical Awards on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Photo by Chris Pizzello
Actor Chris Hemsworth (L) and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Cheryl Boone Isaacs (R) announce the nominees for Best Actress at the 86th Academy Awards nominee announcements in Beverly Hills, California January 16, 2014. Con-men caper "American Hustle" and space thriller "Gravity" led Oscar nominees on Thursday with 10 nominations each, including best picture, in the race for the world's top film prize. The Academy will hand out the Oscars at a ceremony hosted by comedian Ellen DeGeneres in Los Angeles on March 2.
Photo by Phil McCarten
