April is a little early to start talking about next year’s Oscar race, especially for somebody like me who – famously – does not care about the Oscar race. However, something interesting cropped up in the news cycle over the last few days that may potentially get me interested in the winner of a specific category for the first time in quite a while. This fella here is James Ortiz.

You probably don’t recognize his face, but he’s in one of this year’s biggest hits, Project Hail Mary. Ortiz is the puppeteer behind Ryan Gosling’s co-star, Rocky.

Yeah, puppeteer. That little dude wasn’t CGI. It was an actual, physical puppet on-set, albeit with a few computer “enhancements.” But it was really there, interacting with Gosling, and crawling into the movie theater to reach into your chest and steal your still-beating heart.

Evidently, according to Oscar rules, Ortiz’s work is eligible for a nomination in the best supporting actor category in next year’s Academy Awards, and Amazon-MGM has made it clear that they intend to submit him for consideration. Finally, something about these awards is interesting again. You see, one of the (many) reasons I stopped caring about the Oscars is this feeling that they ignore large swaths of movies that don’t fit into their hoity-toity aesthetic, in particular deserving genre films. No puppet character – or any voice performance, for that matter – has ever been nominated for an acting award in the history of the Academy, despite several performances that have been sincerely deserving.

I’m not saying this to denigrate anybody who HAS been nominated. I’m not pointing to anybody specifically and saying “this person didn’t deserve the nomination, it should have been that voice actor instead.” I’m saying that in the 98 year history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, you CANNOT convince me that there has NEVER been a voice acting performance that is worthy of at least a NOMINATION. 

If Ortiz gets the nod, that would be seismic. It would be the kind of thing that gets people’s attention, and the Academy wants that. But the thing is, he shouldn’t get a nomination just because the Academy is trying to get viewers, he should get it because he completely deserves it. Ortiz was the on-set puppeteer for Rocky and did the performance with the expectation that his voice would later be dubbed over by a big-name actor who hadn’t been cast yet. His on-set performance was so perfect, however, the directors decided to keep him for the vocal performance as well. And if you’ve seen Project Hail Mary, you know that the movie just flat-out would not work if the audience didn’t believe in and fall in love with little Rocky. It wasn’t just the vocals, but the motions, the mannerisms of the character. Ortiz created an entire living, sentient being that held his own with one of the movie industry’s top talents and the two of them made each other better. That’s what acting IS, whether you’re doing it with your own body or with a body made of rods and felt. 

It’s going to be an uphill battle, of course, because as I said, the Academy has traditionally shunned movies like this in all but the technical categories (things like special effects, makeup, costume design, etc.) There have, of course, been some few instances of genre films getting mainstream recognition. Sinners – a vampire movie – racked up a lot of nominations last year, including Best Picture, and it took home the awards for Best Actor, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, and Original Score. But the acting award for a vampire movie still went to Michael B. Jordan for his (admittedly, deserving) performance of a pair of human twins. In 2017 The Shape of Water took home Best Picture, as did Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King back in 2003, although both of those were shut out of the acting categories. 

It’s that last part that bristles. Sure, these movies did well, but even though Return of the King took home awards for best picture, director, screenplay, and several others, not a single acting performance was even nominated. That’s absolutely absurd. 

The other thing that’s going to hurt Ortiz’s chance, besides the general Academy Attitude (Acadetude?) towards genre films, is the fact that Project Hail Mary came out very early in the year. By the time awards nominations are getting seriously discussed nine or ten months from now, dozens of other movies will have been released and have heavy Oscar pushes behind them, and it will be much easier for the Academy to ignore a film that doesn’t have that kind of recency bias. So as magnificent as it would be to see Ortiz get the nomination, I am not holding my breath.

Others have suggested that if he doesn’t get a competitive Oscar, the film could receive a “Special Achievement Award,” which is a rarely-given trophy the Academy hands out for groundbreaking work that doesn’t necessarily fit into any other category. It was first handed out in 1972, in an era where modern sound and visual effects were in their infancy and new innovations and technologies were beginning to be developed at a rapid pace. However, the last time a Special Achievement Award was given was back in 1995, for the first Toy Story film, ushering in the era of computer animation. That also feels unlikely. Besides, Ortiz’s performance isn’t a technical game-changer – puppeteering is an ancient art. He was just REALLY FREAKING GOOD AT IT.

This brings me to my larger point – there is a whole section of acting that the Academy has ignored for its entire existence, and it’s time to change that. After all this time, there needs to be a category for – and this is the best term I can come up with for it right now – Best “Created Character.” Vocal performances. Motion capture. Puppeteering. Instances in which a character is crafted in a non-traditional acting performance. These aren’t new concepts – even motion capture has been around for decades at this point – so why aren’t they recognized?

In the alternate universe in which I am in charge of the Academy, instituting this award will be the second thing I do, after installing a trap door under the microphone for anyone who starts yammering about politics in their acceptance speech. This award would be given to an individual or to a group of people who contribute to the creation of said character, with the exact names included decided at the discretion of the film’s producers when submitting for the award. In general, though, this would be used to recognize the vocal performer, on-camera performer, and technical creators of the character, whether that’s one person or an entire team. (It will pointedly NOT be given out for any AI “creations,” as all of the disciplines I mentioned consist of actual human skill and talent, whereas an AI character would require typing in prompts until the computer remembers how many fingers a human being is supposed to have.)

Let me explain. Had this award existed in 1979, when The Muppet Movie came out, Jim Henson could have been nominated for Kermit the Frog. He likely would have been the only person named in the nomination, as he was Kermit’s vocal performer, puppeteer, and designer. For the 1986 version of Little Shop of Horrors, on the other hand, the nomination for Audrey II would have gone to Levi Stubbs, who voiced the plant, and be shared with the principal puppeteers for her. (Wikipedia lists 21 separate individuals as being “principal puppeteers” in this case. That’s a little extreme, but the point is valid.) The nomination would also have been shared with Lyle Conway, who designed the puppet, and the fabrication team who actually built it. 

In traditional animation it’s a little simpler. Let’s use 1991’s Beauty and the Beast – the first animated movie ever to get an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. In most major animated films, each main character has a lead animator or animation team assigned to them, so that person or people would share the nomination with the character’s voice actor. The nomination for the Beast would have gone to voice actor Robbie Benson and lead animator Glen Keane, whereas Belle would have been shared between voice actor Paige O’Hara and animators James Baxter and Mark Henn. 

Then there’s motion capture, the (relatively) new kid on the block, which is an interesting kind of marriage between puppeteering and animation. In mo-cap, a performer’s motions and mannerisms are captured by computer and used as the model for the animated character. The performer may or may not also provide the character’s voice. The most legendary example of this is Andy Serkis, who performed Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films, and is often cited as the most egregious oversight in the trilogy’s many, many acting snubs. Serkis was both the on-set performance actor and the voice actor for Gollum, and in my category would share the award with digital “puppeteers” Jason Schleifer and Bay Raitt, who used Serkis’s performance to create the animated character. It would be similar for a character like Rocket Raccoon from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, where the award would be shared between the digital creators (I wasn’t able to find the names of the individuals, but the effects company who worked on him in the first film was called Framestore), voice actor Bradley Cooper, and motion capture performer Sean Gunn. 

Amusingly, my own rules don’t specify that the performer be human, which would make a character like Krypto from Superman and this summer’s Supergirl also eligible. The puppeteering team would have to share the award with James Gunn’s dog Ozu, who was the model for Krypto. I mention this mainly because I find the idea of Gunn walking onto the Academy Award stage carrying his little hyperactive dog to be absolutely adorable.

Is the creation of this new award likely? To be honest, probably not. But it’s not impossible, either. After all, the Academy announced last year that it will introduce a new competitive category, “Achievement in Stunt Design,” beginning with the 2028 awards ceremony. That’s right! Stuntwork, one of the most fundamental elements of filmmaking since its inception, will begin getting recognized at the 100th Academy Awards! And if it took a mere  century for stuntwork to get the recognition it deserves, how far behind could my little idea possibly be?

I don’t really expect the Academy to make these changes, of course. And I don’t really hold out a lot of hope for Ortiz to get the nomination he deserves. But there’s always a chance, right? I suppose I agree with Ron Swanson: “I still think awards are stupid, but they’d be less stupid if they went to the right people.” 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. The fact that Carroll Spinney went recognized for his tearjerker performance in the 1985 masterpiece Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird will never cease to pain him.