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| The Jungle Book, which is nominated for Best Visual Effects |
Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s
Countdown to the Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be
sure to check back every day leading up to the ceremony for analysis of each of
the Academy’s 24 categories and more.
Best Visual Effects
The nominees are:
Deepwater Horizon
Doctor Strange
The Jungle Book
Kubo and the Two Strings
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Coming
off perhaps the most unusual winner in this category’s history, and indeed a
refreshingly prestige-heavy lineup of nominees, the Academy gets back to
business as usual – mostly. Last year, Ex Machina shocked the
room by besting three Best Picture nominees and a Star Wars sequel
to become the lowest-budgeted and lowest-grossing winner in recent history.
In
addition, never before had three Best Picture nominees made it into the Visual
Effects category. This time around, the Academy has course corrected with a
lineup featuring no films that also are vying for the top prize. This is the just
the second time this has happened since the category expanded to five nominees
in 2010.
The Ex-Machina victory
was an outlier in every way, and while it spurred one of my personal biggest
cheers of the night, it does little to help us predict how the category will go
down this year. If we toss out last year, these two rules of thumb generally
apply: 1) If a Best Picture nominee is in the mix, it wins; 2) if not, the film
with the most other nominations wins.
Unfortunately,
neither of those rules really helps us this year as none of the nominated films
caught on with the Academy in a meaningful way. This is the only nomination
for Doctor Strange and The Jungle Book. Kubo
and the Two Strings, the first animated nominee since The Nightmare
Before Christmas in 1993, is nominated for this and Best Animated
Feature. And Deepwater Horizon and Rogue One: A Star
Wars Story have only a single sound nod each, Deepwater
Horizon for Sound Editing and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story for
Sound Mixing.
The
biggest surprise was probably the exclusion of Arrival, which was
among the 10 Visual Effects finalists and scored eight nominations overall,
including Best Picture. The effects work may not be as flashy in Arrival as
in these nominees, but given its strength with the Academy, it would have been
a likely winner had it made it in, so its miss here has to be considered a
snub.
Rogue
One: A Star Wars Story –
When all other stats fail, go big. If you are searching for a winner in this
group, you could do worse than the well liked, well reviewed box-office smash
from a beloved film franchise. Rogue One is the eighth film in
the Star Wars franchise and the seventh to earn a nomination
for Best Visual Effects. Only Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the
Sith missed out. The only bump on the road to victory may be this:
While all three films in the original trilogy won this award, none since have
taken home the prize. But in an unusual year, it still helps to look for the
familiar.
It
does not get much more familiar than the crew nominated for this film. John
Knoll is a six-time nominee, including for The Phantom Menace and Attack
of the Clones, and took home the prize for Pirates of the
Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. He shared that award with Hal T. Hickel, who
is enjoying his fourth nomination overall. Neil Corbould has five previous
nominations and two wins, most recently for Gravity, and while this
is Mohen Leo’s first nomination, he has worked in the visual effects department
on a number of nominated films, including The Martian just
last year.
The
Jungle Book –
Perhaps the real frontrunner, though, is this beautifully realized fantasy film
that brings to life one of the all-time classic Disney animated features.
Back-to-back losses for the superlative new Planet of the Apes franchise
notwithstanding, photorealistic animal effects tend to be handsomely rewarded
by the Academy, evidenced by recent winners such as Babe, Gladiator, The
Golden Compass, and Life of Pi. The Jungle Book features
wall-to-wall animal effects that are gorgeously rendered and wonderfully
integrated into the film.
This
is Robert Legato’s fourth nomination, and he previously won for Titanic and Hugo.
Andrew R. Jones won this award in 2009 for Avatar and was also
nominated for I, Robot. Dan Lemmon was nominated for Dawn
of the Planet of the Apes and Rise of the Planet of the Apes,
meaning he could finally get an Oscar for all that beautiful animal effects
work. Meanwhile, Adam Valdez is on his first nomination, though he worked as an
animation supervisor and department head on the first two Lord of the
Rings films, which both won this category.
Doctor
Strange –
The third Disney film in the lineup this year, this is the least likely winner
of the three, despite the psychedelic trip that makes up much of the film’s
final act. It is surprising to me Marvel films have not done better in this
category. The Marvel Cinematic universe is 14 films deep by this point, and
much of its success and entertainment value is built on its effects work. While
the seven nominations the series has pulled are tied with Star Wars for the most in any series, the franchise has no wins to
show for it, which has to be disappointing.
Stephane Ceretti and Paul Corbould, nominated against his brother
Neil, mentioned above, were on the team that was nominated for Guardians of the Galaxy two years ago.
Despite being the biggest box-office hit of that 2014 lineup, it lost to Interstellar, the more beloved movie
within the Academy, which could be informative once again this year. Ceretti
and Paul Corbould are joined by first-time nominees Richard Bluff and Vincent
Cirelli.
Deepwater
Horizon – Pete Berg and Mark Wahlberg’s first collaboration to be
released in 2016, followed later by Patriots
Day, was unfairly ignored by the movie-going public. Their previous
true-life collaboration, 2013’s Lone
Survivor, was a massive hit and was not better or worse a film than this.
It stands to reason a Middle East war thriller is a much easier sell than an
oil rig fire, though at their most basic level, both tell the story of man-made
disasters. Whatever the cause for it barely breaking even at the box office, Deepwater Horizon deserved a better
fate, using as it does the populist action film template to tell a critically
important story about our world today.
The visual effects, in concert with the magnificent art direction
and engrossing sound work, are crucial to that telling. The film’s highly
detailed and carefully crafted recreation of the Deepwater Horizon disaster are
a testament to the Berg and his crew’s dedication and talent. Craig Hammack,
Jason H. Snell, and Jason Billington are all first-timers with the Academy,
while Burt Dalton is a four-time nominee who won his first time out for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
Kubo
and the Two Strings – As mentioned above, this Laika Entertainment
treat, directed by Travis Knight, is the first animated nominee since The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1993
and joins that film as the only two straight animated flicks to be nominated
for Visual Effects. That earlier film was beaten out by Jurassic Park, which certainly was never going to lose, and Kubo and the Two Strings is likely to be
bested by another big-budget fantasy-adventure movie. That, of course, does not
diminish the power or the beauty of Knight and crew’s lovely stop-motion
animation.
This is the first Academy recognition for each of Steve Emerson,
Oliver Jones, Brian McClean, and Brad Schiff. All four men have worked on all
four of Laika’s feature films – Coraline,
ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo and
the Two Strings – and only Emerson has any credits outside the animation
field, mostly as a digital compositor on films like the Matrix sequels and Transformers.
The nomination – and the history that comes with it – is probably the reward
for this group, but as we saw last year, anything can happen.
The final analysis
The best of these is The
Jungle Book, which seamlessly balances its naturalistic jungle settings
with the its fantastical elements, particularly the gigantopithecus King Louie.
Director Jon Favreau and crew create such an effortless flow the audience is
simply whisked away into the film’s world. Apart from featuring the best visual
effects of the lot, The Jungle Book
is a massive worldwide hit from a huge studio reimagining one of its most
famous stories. Rogue One: A Star Wars
Story is probably the only challenger, but the Academy seems to have Star Wars fatigue, at least in terms of
giving it the win, and it will probably take something truly exceptional from
the franchise to reach the podium once again.
Will win: The
Jungle Book
Should
win: The Jungle Book
Should
have been here: Captain America: Civil War
Tomorrow:
Best Sound Editing
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