The Academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony, which took place Saturday night at the Beverly Wilshire hotel, demonstrated a couple of things conclusively.
First, it showed that filmmaking is a very complicated business, particularly to those of us who can’t tell high fidelity reflectance data from sub-pixel offsets of the CMOS array sensor.
Second, it showed that the people who do understand that stuff need to have a pretty good sense of humor.
The Academy’s annual tribute to the folks who put the sciences into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the ones whose scientific and technical breakthroughs make it possible for all those better-known Oscar nominees to do their jobs, was also a night for nerd jokes.
Lots of nerd jokes, all coming from the mouth of Elizabeth Banks, the show’s host, who came onstage after a montage of scenes from her films, including “Seabiscuit,” “The 40 Year Old Virgin,” “W.” and “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.”
The clip from that last film, which ended the montage, featured brief shots of Banks in her underwear. “Wow, thank you,” she said when she took the stage. “That was really my ass and boobs. That was unexpected.”
Banks’s job meant not only reading explanations of things like point-based rendering and high-fidelity reflectance data, but also announcing winners with names like Gyula Priskin and Mark Jaszberenyi.
“As you might have guessed, I am not an expert” in the science of movie-making, said the actress, whose appearance in the “Spider-Man” movies apparently qualified her for a gig that always goes to a young actress who’s appeared in one or two effects-laden films.
Her lack of knowledge, she added, was “Not because I am a blond. Or a woman. It’s because I’m not a nerd.”
She quickly added that she respects nerds, depends on them for things, and even married one. But those jokes turned into the running theme of the evening – and by the time she said something about zits, and then added, “not that I get zits; I’m just trying to relate to you guys,” you could hear a little grumbling in the audience.
For the most part, though, the crowd laughed at Banks’ nerd jokes and applauded her for making her way through technical descriptions that she admitted she was going to “read but not fully understand.”
The Sci-Tech Awards ceremony is an unusual event, where the warmup act is almost always a magician (it was Dana Daniels on Saturday), every winner gets to talk for as long as he wants (yes, the honorees were exclusively male), the audience is full of people from ILM and Texas Instruments and Fujifilm instead of Paramount and Warner Bros., and many of the achievements being honored have been in the works for years, and in some cases even decades.
The event, said AMPAS president Tom Sherak in his introductory remarks, began in the bar of the Beverly Wilshire in 1975, when Gregory Peck and then-Academy president Walter Mirisch hosted a small, informal ceremony.
