"Don't call it the nerd Oscars"

There's no bling, no limo gridlock and only one famous face -- but one night celebrates the techies who make our movies better.

By Scott Kirsner

Read more: Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Academy Awards

Scott Leva (inset), developer of the precision stunt air bag, which is designed to pull the performer in whether he or she lands in the center or close to an edge.

Feb. 21, 2006 | BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- The camera crews from "Entertainment Tonight" and "Access Hollywood" were clearly vexed: Unlike at other banquets held during the busy season leading up to the Oscars, full of famous faces, no one streaming into the International Ballroom at the Beverly Hilton on Feb. 18 was even remotely recognizable to them. Most of the attendees' garb looked as though it was bought off the rack at Nordstrom, and no one was wearing gaudy baubles borrowed from Harry Winston. When interviewed by the TV and radio reporters positioned behind the black velvet ropes, the evening's award winners were more likely to discourse on compression algorithms, cloth-simulation software or robotic camera mounts than to grin and gripe about the nonexistent limo gridlock outside the hotel.

The occasion was the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual Scientific and Technical Awards, which each year's Oscar host fleetingly refers to as "a ceremony held earlier" before cueing a 30-second video summary of the event. There's usually a grand total of one celebrity at the Sci-Tech Awards: the evening's host. The banquet's organizers at the academy have a solid record of landing actresses on the way up, including Charlize Theron, Kate Hudson and, last year, Scarlett Johansson. This year's host was Rachel McAdams, seen recently in "The Family Stone," "Wedding Crashers" and "The Notebook."

As someone who identifies less with the international megacelebs who'll strut into the Kodak Theatre on the first Sunday in March, and more with the working stiffs behind the scenes trying to keep the directors, cinematographers and editors happy, I'd always been curious about the Sci-Tech Awards. Did they have anything in common with Hollywood's biggest night, aside from plastic statues of Oscar guarding every pillar?

The Sci-Tech Awards celebrate the mechanics of moviemaking, recognizing "any device, method, formula, discovery or invention of special and outstanding value," according to the academy. Awards this year went to a system that can keep a movie camera level even if it's on a boat in the middle of a roiling ocean; the graphics research that makes the characters in Pixar movies more realistic looking; and a newly designed air bag that's less likely to cause stunt people to bounce off and be injured when they hit it from great heights. There are no "For Your Consideration" campaigns in advance of the Sci-Tech Awards, no seat fillers in the audience and, amazingly, no time limits on speeches. "It has never been a problem," says Rich Miller, the administrative director at the academy who has overseen the Sci-Tech Awards since 1988. "We haven't had to install the microphone that starts descending into the floor when you've talked too long."

The ballroom last Saturday wasn't pervaded by tension or anxiety -- all of the winners had been announced a month before. So everyone could enjoy the four-course dinner without worrying about going home empty-handed, and no one had to fake an "I'm so happy for that jerk who edged me out" smile. At my table were three winners, J. Walt Adamczyk, Michael Sorensen and Alvah Miller; the trio of engineers and computer scientists won for a remotely controllable camera system that can execute the exact same moves, take after take, and for "pre-visualization" software that gives directors an early, rudimentary view of how computer-generated sets and special effects will look once they've been integrated with the live-action footage. The rig has been used in "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" and "Spider-Man 2."

Miller said he'd won "five or six" Sci-Tech Awards in his career, and he'd also been a guest at the main-event Oscars. "This is better than the Oscars," he said. "The Oscars are too long and too boring."

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