Acting in movies, no doubt, is very difficult. You have to spend a lot of time in stifling costumes, under layers of make-up, pretending your hardest for hours on end, transforming hollow words on a page into something concrete and knowable–like a character with a prosthetic nose and an involved backstory you made up in order to make your grown-up version of dress-up that much more believable. Seriously, it must be exhausting.
But as arduous as acting in movies seems, acting in commercials must be much, much harder.
Take, for example, this commercial for Nintendo DS starring Nicole Kidman. Her mission as an actress in this ad is three-fold:
1. She must convey that she doesn't know how to play Rock, Paper, Scissors, one of the simplest games in the world, very well.
2. She must convey that by playing Rock, Paper, Scissors on a Nintendo DS, she is actually getting smarter.
3. She must somehow convey that she is, in fact, a human being, which is especially difficult considering that most human beings aren't eerily translucent creatures with immobile foreheads and icy eyes.
Most actresses would shy away from such a challenging test of their craft, but then again most actresses aren't Nicole Kidman:
Clearly Oscars aren't meaningless.