Geeks meet glitz as technical Oscars awarded

9.00 am

LOS ANGELES - It was geeks' night out in Hollywood as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honoured the technicians who have improved the ways movies are shot and shown.

Actress Charlize Theron presented the 25 awards on Saturday night, three weeks and a day before the main Oscar ceremony, in a night defined by obscure points of engineering and their relation to movie magic.

Theron, who has appeared in Woody Allen's The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and opposite Matt Damon in The Legend of Bagger Vance, brought a touch of glitz to geekdom, as she struggled through a script that forced her to sing the praises of "infinite baffle techniques" and "view interpololation" algorithms.

The closest she came before to such technical derring-do was a horror film called The Astronaut's Wife.

"Just tell me if you don't want a kiss," she said after one of the winners, an overwhelmingly male group, appeared to balk at the Hollywood custom.

In Oscar tradition, those receiving the awards thanked the Academy, but they also thanked thesis advisers, physics departments and sometimes the technology itself for their prizes.

"Without good transducers, this would have all been for nought," said Mark Engebretson, one of three JBL engineers whose work in the early 1980s lead to the current generation of theatre loudspeaker systems.

The devices cited by the Academy as breakthroughs included an underwater camera that can shoot from a shark's point of view used in Jurassic Park III and a low-slung truck rig with a car body attached used to put actors in the middle of high-speed chase scenes in The Fast and The Furious.

Industrial Light & Magic, the San Francisco-based special effects house founded by George Lucas in 1975, won awards for two computer software developments: a Creature Dynamics System, used to animate the mummy-king Imhotep in The Mummy, and a Motion and Structure Recovery System.

The latter is a complex programme that allows a computer to scan through film while tracking the perspective of the camera from several dozen points. The result: as in Pearl Harbour, moviemakers can take a moving aerial shot and add everything from digital battleships, moving planes and explosions more quickly and accurately.

That extra speed in production means a cost saving for studios, an important consideration for a number of awards.

A team of Eastman Kodak engineers, for example, was honoured for having developed a film system with a sound track that can be played at any theatre, bringing down the cost of distributing movies.

Before that development, the studios had to make, ship and track four different kinds of prints to match the four sound systems currently in use in movie theatres, the Academy said.

More than a third of the technical Oscars went to technology that included new software for processing images, an indication of how closely tied the field has become to blockbuster productions.

Lance Williams won a certificate for his pioneering work on computer-generated images while at Apple Computer, which included a solution to the thorny problem of teaching the machine to cast shadows on curved surfaces.

"If, like me, you knew computer animation when she was a sweet, awkward and enthusiastic kid, it's a treat to see she's become a movie star," he said.

- REUTERS

nzherald.co.nz/oscars

Oscar nominees (full list)