“War for the Planet of the Apes” has opened to universal acclaim and a renewed call to give an Oscar to Andy Serkis, the actor who pioneered and perfected motion capture acting as lead ape Caesar in the Planet of the Apes trilogy, as well as King Kong and Smeagol/Gollum in Peter Jackson’s sojourns to Skull island and Middle Earth).
This push to award Serkis an acting oscar (now for Caesar and earlier for Gollum) or a Special Achievement Academy Award has come up many times over the years, yet so far yielded no nominations and no special consideration. Conventional wisdom is that many actors feel threatened by motion capture, fearing that its special effects creations will eliminate acting work, rather than recognizing it as a vehicle for greater acting opportunities and adding to the art of acting. However the tide may be turning this year, because a champion of Andy Serkis’, none other than Whoopi Goldberg, has just been elected governor of the actors branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors. And within less than two weeks after joining the Board, Goldberg made this public endorsement of Andy Serkis on The View:
“I saw “War for the Planet of the Apes”. It was so good. It was so good on so many levels. There are a lot of folks in the film, but it’s really a two person character piece. And it’s Woody Harrelson and this marvelous man who you’ve seen in other films like “Lord of the Rings”, he played Gollum. His name is Andy Serkis. … Andy is able to do things in this film that other actors would love to be able to elicit from people. …
I do think it is [a new frontier for actors]. It is a whole other genre of acting. When you look at him as Gollum … What you see on that creature’s face, all of that that you’re seeing is not made up. That’s the actor. The CGI, the dots that he’s wearing so that they can paint in the creature he’s being – it’s kind of spectacular when you can see what he can do, because it’s him doing it.
[Can he get an award?] I’ve been working on this since he did the very first Gollum. The first time I saw him and found out it was an actor doing it, I was out of my mind. Then I saw Planet of the Apes, and I was like ‘Somebody needs to give this man an award from the academy saying: for forwarding the actor’s ability.’ Because he is now taken us to a different level where actors can actually play anything. They can now play anything. It’s amazing.”
Sometimes this research took me into even earlier times, for need of greater context. Which is how I learned about the “female friendships” of the 19th century. These would be intense relationships between two women, in school or college, that could be as deeply bonded as any traditionally romantic or familial bond. Publicly these “female friendships” could exhibit all the hallmarks of romance: physical affection, love letters, lavishing gifts on another, intense jealousies, sharing beds, displays of devastating heartbreak when relationships dissolved. Society approved and encouraged these “female friendships” as a way for young women to exercise romantic proclivities within the safety of sorority, away from male temptation. That these friendships could become sexual was not imagined. That doesn’t mean however that some of these female friendships didn’t become sexual.
Times were different in the 1800’s. Men sharing beds with men and women sharing beds with women was common. The terms heterosexual and homosexual weren’t even coined until the end of the 19th century. But once coined, their usage and the greater awareness of homosexual identity and activity seeped into society by the early 20th century. Intense “female friendships”, as practiced and encouraged in middle class society in the 19th century, now became tainted and suspect. Suspicion and fear of lesbianism made something once deemed a normal rite of passage for young women now appear unhealthy and dangerous.
It wouldn’t be a visit to the botanic garden without the obligatory “Ed sniffs a flower” picture, as my Facebook Friends have already learned to expect from us with seasonal regularly.
To get to the unicorn one must find the meadow in the sky. A wizard helps the knight get to the meadow in the sky by magically creating a rainbow up to the clouds. The knight climbs up the rainbow. So far so complicated (and unromantic). But we are not there yet.
I was introduced to BJ and her writings that would eventually become “The Oriole’s Song” during a weekend visit to Philadelphia over 23 years ago. While Ed, Dave, BJ and other family members were leaving the house to attend Quaker Meeting, BJ handed me sheets of paper containing two short stories she had written for her writing group. She insisted I read them and tell her what I thought, as I was “an artist”. I felt a little trepidation. Ed and I had been dating for only half a year and I was meeting many of his relatives, including BJ, for the first time that weekend, and now I was being asked to read and judge her writing? What if I didn’t care for it? Already imagining devising diplomatic responses, I sat down to read in the empty house. By the time the family returned from Meeting, I was flush with the excitement of having encountered a thing of beauty.
BJ and I spent much of the rest of the day talking about her short stories, and how she planned writing more, vignettes that would eventually form the chapters of her memoir. She told me about her girlhood in China, her experiences of the war, of being one of the only Caucasian children in Yuanling, and feeling even more like a stranger as a teenager in the United States. She told me about returning to China in the 1970’s during the height of the Cultural Revolution with Dave and the two China born daughters they’d adopted in the 1960’s. She told me about returning again in the 1990’s, and floating high over Yuanling in a boat, now that the city of her childhood was drowned by the raised waters of the Yuan River Dam. She told me how her father was one of the last Americans left in China when the Communists took over in 1948, how he was denounced and put on trial and convicted as a spy, marked for execution.
The only formal requirement is that it must be no longer than 100 minutes duration.”
