Rocky deserves an Oscar. Surprise, surprise, surprise.
Stage actor and master puppeteer James Ortiz is the central character of Rocky, the spider-like alien who is the centerpiece of one of the year’s most talked-about films, the Amazon-MGM Studios space travel blockbuster Project Hail Mary. The character, brought to life by an intricate puppetry and voice performance opposite Ryan Gosling, has become one of the film’s most recognizable elements, and the studio is already planning how to position it in the fall awards race. Ortiz will be nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Award.
Awards buffs should expect the film to compete alongside a strong craftsman campaign across major categories, including Best Picture and Best Director for Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. But Ortiz’s performance raises more complex questions. Can non-traditional acting roles rival human acting?
Variety has exclusively learned that Ortiz’s work will be considered for the Academy Awards in the acting category under current regulations. In addition, the organization confirmed to his representatives that his work will make the puppeteer eligible for the acting award, which falls under the jurisdiction of SAG-AFTRA. However, under the current rules of the Golden Globe Awards, his work is not eligible. There are no clear guidelines for excluding him from the Critics’ Choice Awards, suggesting he will be considered. Given that BAFTA is the only voting body that nominates animated voice acting performances, he may also qualify: Eddie Murphy for Shrek (2001) was named Best Supporting Actor.
This ambiguity highlights a long-standing debate in the industry about how to classify achievements that blur the lines between acting, voice work, and technical artistry. It also points directly to the mechanisms that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences built for this very purpose, and that the academy has largely abandoned for more than 30 years.
The Special Achievement Award, introduced in 1972, was perhaps the Academy’s most flexible system. The award was designed to recognize groundbreaking work that didn’t fit neatly into existing categories, arriving at a moment when rapid technological and creative innovation was outpacing the Oscar rulebook. For more than 20 years, the Academy has allowed us to celebrate achievements that might otherwise go unrecognized.
The award is most often used to spotlight advances in sound and visual effects, with 18 films recognized for their advancements in those technologies. It began with artists LB Abbott and AD Flowers, who were responsible for the visual effects for the disaster epic The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and established a pattern of celebrating craftsmen whose work redefined what was possible on screen. Among the most enduring examples is sound designer Ben Burtt. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award for creating the voice of the alien creature R2-D2 in Star Wars. This contribution functions as a performance in every sense of the word and remains an inseparable part of cinema’s cultural heritage.
There have also been moments when the Academy has developed its awards more creatively, expanding its scope beyond a single craft category. Richard Williams was the first recipient of the award to go beyond the traditional sound and visual effects realm for his contribution to Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). As an animation director, he directed groundbreaking films that integrated hand-drawn characters into live-action. He also helped design iconic figures such as Jessica Rabbit. He won a competitive Oscar for the film in the visual effects category, but the Lifetime Achievement Award allowed the Academy to single out a clear artistic originator behind the animation.
The last film to win was “Toy Story” (1995), which was honored as the first fully computer-animated feature five years before the Academy formally recognized its progress by creating the award for Best Animated Feature.
The distinction becomes even clearer when we look back at what has been absorbed into existing categories rather than being unified. H.R. Giger’s design for the Xenomorph in Ridley Scott’s Alien was recognized as part of the Oscar-winning film’s visual effects team, even though the creature functions as a fully realized character rather than just an effect. Those same characteristics are at the heart of what Ortiz created with Rocky: a tactile, expressive, and vibrant presence. The history of Lifetime Achievement Awards makes it clear that the Academy has found ways to honor this type of work even when existing categories are insufficient.
In recent years, the Academy has largely distanced itself from this award. But this could be the perfect year to bring it back.
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“Usually we talk about puppetry as a technical achievement, and it really is,” Ortiz told Variety. “It’s a spectacle. But for me as a performer, it’s never an entry point. I’m interested in the hearts of the characters. What they’re trying to convey, what they’re feeling at their core. When we can take a medium like puppetry, which is often seen as decorative, and bring heart-pounding characters to life in a way that truly affects people, we’re doing something truly meaningful.”
Ortiz talks about his process like an actor. Because he’s an actor.
Whether he’s eligible and whether the Oscars will actually nominate him are fundamentally different questions, which lead to the next three questions the Academy must address.
The Academy has never officially recognized audio, motion capture, or hybrid performance in any acting category, but will it ever feel compelled to do so? If not, do performances like Ortiz’s deserve a Lifetime Achievement Award? And if acting departments aren’t willing to accept these artists as actors, does the industry need an entirely new category, a formal home for voice performance, motion capture, and puppetry work that hasn’t existed in 50 years?
Gosling and Ortiz rehearsed each scene before bringing out the doll, nailing the blocks between them first. Despite Rocky’s unconventional appearance (he has no face or conventional means of expression), he is a groundbreaking figure in cinema. Ortiz worked with designer Neil Scanlan to solve the central challenge of making living creatures feel appealing. This accomplishment merits serious consideration for a Lifetime Achievement Award, even if it doesn’t exactly appear on the ballot.
Early versions of this conversation surfaced around the work of Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The Critics’ Choice Awards nominated Serkis for Best Supporting Actor for the latter. They gave him a special award as Best Digital Acting Performance for the former. He reappeared in the same conversation when he brought “King Kong” to life in 2005. The Oscars took over all of that.
The debate continued with James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar, which featured outstanding performances from the cast, including Zoe Saldaña. Industry resistance was articulated at the 2010 Newsweek Oscar Roundtable, where Morgan Freeman said of motion-capture performances:
Some of Hollywood’s old guard almost certainly still feel that way. While that sentiment is understandable, the industry has lost reputation for decades that can never be regained. The voice actor debate has a long history. Robin Williams’ performance as the Genie in Aladdin (1992) prompted the Golden Globe Awards to award him with a one-time Lifetime Achievement Award. A conversation with Ellen DeGeneres, who played Dory in Finding Nemo (2003), has resurfaced. It culminated in Scarlett Johansson’s role as the AI Samantha in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), for which she was nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award.
Some of the film’s most compelling historical precedents deepen this question. Where does Frank Oz’s Yoda in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) fit in today’s awards climate? Jim Henson created an entire performance genre that still thrives today. So where does The Muppets (2011) ensemble fit in? Steve Whitmire populated one movie with Kermit the Frog, Beaker, Statler, Rizzo the Rat, Link Hogslob, Lips, and the paperboy. If that’s not acting, then you need to better define that word.
The academy has shown institutional curiosity. In 2017, after winning back-to-back Oscars for Birdman and The Revenant, Alejandro G. Iñárritu demonstrated his openness to new forms of storytelling by winning a Special Achievement Oscar for his large-scale immersive virtual reality installation Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible). However, that attitude has not translated into policy.
This is exactly where the Academy needs to innovate again, and the Lifetime Achievement Award is a tool it already has. Rocky isn’t just a visual effect or a disembodied voice. The physicality, precision, and comedic timing of the characters are rooted in Ortiz’s performance, mediated through puppetry and design in the same way that motion-capture performance is mediated through technology. As Hollywood continues to grapple with the perceived existential threat of artificial intelligence, the industry has yet to formally answer the more fundamental question at hand: If Ortiz isn’t acting, what on earth is he doing?
There is a special achievement award. The Academy knows how to use it. Fist Rocky Cobb.
