Oscar Snubs Leave 'Avatar' Actors Feeling Blue

Nearly everyone agrees that "Avatar" is a hugely successful movie at the box office, and some see it as worthy of an Academy Award for Best Picture. But individual acting performances in the movie by Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana and Sigourney Weaver were not nominated for awards.

Turns out there is a controversy over just what constitutes acting. The three performers mentioned above spent much or all of their on-screen time as 10-foot-tall blue creatures. They acted out every move seen on screen, so it was much more than lending a human voice to an animated character. But it wasn't conventional acting either, since the on-screen characters were highly sophisticated computer renderings made possible through a technique called "performance capture."

According to this Los Angeles Times article, some believe that performance capture could make movie stars, in the conventional sense, obsolete.