Not a pearl, but a diamond. Due to personal circumstances, I have been following some Oscar nominations very closely this year. One of them is “Best Animated Short Film”. The best academician was called a rather charming and beautiful, but in general, standard Pixar sketch “The Sandman / the Piper”. I guess that's why! They're academics, right?
And here I really want to speak about it. Let’s not dwell on that “objective” for long. Oscar or "Don't Tear at All." The important thing here is that the Oscar ceremony remains perhaps the most massive and notable of the annual film events. No matter how doubtful the award-winning film product is, it is automatically doomed to universal scrutiny. The winners are scolded, praised, criticized by almost everyone who follows this process at least a little. And that’s why, this year, Patrick Osborne’s Pearl was supposed to receive the golden image, and now I’ll try to explain why, but I’ll start from afar.
To begin with, I am one of those people who used to be called one unprintable word. Now they use the politically correct neologism "Geek" instead. So, like Gick, I literally grew up with a gamepad in my hands. Electronic entertainment has evolved from leaping pixels to an endless billion-dollar industry that has long surpassed cinema in its capitalization. And so the gaming industry puts on the conveyor belt what the generation of re-recorded to creak VHS-ok only dreamed of. A virtual reality helmet. Or "VR."
And at this stage in the narrative, with sparks and pearl shine, bursts the same “Pearl”. The first VR nominee in the history of the American Film Academy. This is a significant event for both industries.
As soon as the train arrived at La Ciota Station in 1895, the filmmakers knew what to do with the audience’s attention. It needs to be guided. Filmmakers, actors, artists and cameramen have all these years shown us a quadrangular space in which everything that needs to be seen and paid attention takes place. Emotions on the faces of actors should be shown only in the order in which they were mounted. And in order to demonstrate a chic explosion or reception from aero-kung fu in all its glory, the camera will occupy the most optimal point in advance. Or at all, elegantly flies around the spectacular moment. And the moment "Pearl" hits the list of Oscar nominees, the rules changed.
Now the viewer chooses where to look. The dictatorship of the frame is overthrown. And what last year was considered an expensive toy for spacious living rooms, has turned into a new way of presenting the story. One in which the direction of your gaze and attention creates a new story every time you're told it. What attracts you this time? Growing up a girl? A father's experience? Are you going to spend the next five minutes looking at the road and the trash in the car? Whatever you choose, you will always miss what is beyond your peripheral vision.
Thousands of viewers will see the same moment from thousands of angles. The old machine is revealed here as a powerful allusion to the subjectivity of the same moment for different participants. A long trip for someone will be remembered for a restless sleep in the back seat, and for someone a tedious look at the road markings. That's why people fight so often. They live together, but see and remember it in completely different ways.
In the language of propaganda, this is democracy in action. In the end, you will get what you want. Not always what you need.
But this is the simplest “Turgenev” plot, devoid of large space and complex drama. The life of the characters of the “pearl” immediately acquires depth. You've been in that car with them all these years. He was sitting right on the right hand of his father and then his daughter. Did you notice the moment she grew up? Or the one where he grew old?
Now it is even difficult to realize what horizons before the cinema opens the recognition of this cartoon. And what challenge does VR pose to all future filmmakers? The fact that a simple animation, made not on the most advanced graphics engine for VR, got, albeit not in the most prestigious, but in the Oscar nomination, turns the Pearl into a diamond. To appreciate which, unfortunately, academicians have failed.