LOS ANGELES – Nobody will get red carpet treatment this year when Hollywood pauses Sunday for its annual celebration of the best in the motion picture industry.
Academy Award officials have canceled the traditional “red carpet” entrance for Hollywood stars at this year’s Oscar awards because of the looming war with Iraq.
Oscars executives say the decision was made because celebrities felt uncomfortable at the prospect of chatting with journalists and posing for photos in a time of war.
They stressed that while the pre-show event will be eliminated, the presentation ceremony itself will go on.
Oscars official Gil Cates has asked Oscar presenters not to deviate from their scripts to talk about war. He said he would prefer Oscar winners to do the same, but they are free to say whatever they choose in their acceptance speeches.
Mr. Cates also said the show will be delayed if the ABC television network preempts it to broadcast war coverage. But he said odds are the show will go on.
The Scientific and Technical Academy Awards were presented on March 1, 2003, at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA.
Scientific and Technical Awards are given for devices, methods, formulas, discoveries or inventions of special and outstanding value to the arts and sciences of motion pictures that also have a proven history of use in the motion picture industry.
One Oscar went to Canadian developers of a software program called Maya, a 3-D animation, modeling and rendering production tool. The “Maya” software is in extremely wide use, and can create computer-generated versions of anything from character models to sets and backdrops which are indistinguishable from live-action film footage. The customizable software has been used to some degree on nearly every feature using 3-D computer-generated images and was employed extensively in such films as “Spider-Man,” “Ice Age,” “Hollow Man” and “The Perfect Storm.”
“Maya is the tool set that’s used by the artists to create the eye-popping visual effects and computer-generated characters in the movies,” explained Doug Walker, who heads the Toronto-based company that developed the software. “Just think about how you felt the first time you saw a dinosaur in Jurassic Park. That’s what Maya will allow artists to do.”
The software was used in the fantasy The Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers and Star Wars: Episode 2, the most recent installment of George Lucas’s science fiction franchise. (voa)
