Countdown to the Oscars: Best Visual Effects

We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.

Best Visual Effects

The nominees are:

All Quiet on the Western Front

Avatar: The Way of Water

The Batman

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Top Gun: Maverick

Every year, we start this countdown with this category. At this point, it’s a tradition. I suppose the craven reason is because this is the category with the most films a majority of people will recognize. That becomes less and less the case as we get deeper and deeper into the Oscars race. However, a funny thing happened on the way to the Dolby this year: The Academy Awards got popular again. Best Picture this year includes four unequivocal hits, including two of the biggest movies of all time. The producers of the show, as well as executives at ABC, must be ecstatic.

For us, this means we will be discussing a lot of movies people have heard of, and it means the often blockbuster-heavy Visual Effects lineup is also unusually Best Picture heavy. Three of the five films nominated for Visual Effects are in the Best Picture race, something that has only happened two other times in Academy history. The first was in 1940, when there were 14 nominees and the category meant something very different. The other is a year we always talk about: 2015, when sci-fi indie Ex-Machina shocked the room and beat out the epics.

That was one of the more shocking moments in recent Oscars history – a wholly deserved win for an excellent film, but shocking nonetheless. The most likely scenario is that the three Best Picture nominees that year (The Revenant, Mad Max: Fury Road, and The Martian) all split the vote, allowing the smaller-scale film to sneak up the middle and take the award. 

This year, there is no such “small” film in the race. These are all massive epics of the sort the Academy usually rewards. In addition, the reason we talk about 2015 so much is because it is such a baffling outlier in this category. Apart from that one time, going back to 1977, when the modern history of this category really took shape, if there is a Best Picture nominee in the lineup, it wins. If there are multiple Best Picture nominees, one of them wins. I would not expect this year to break that tradition, particularly not with the king of effects-based filmmaking in the hunt.

Avatar: The Way of Water – In the 13 years between the original Avatar and its sequel, visual effects have taken a tremendous leap as an artform. Much of that leap can be attributed to the work James Cameron and his Oscar-winning effects team pioneered on that first film. Now, they are back with the next great innovation in computer effects. The film is a visual extravaganza, and while I cannot say the high frame rate or 3D effects are always effective, both look better than any other film that has ever tried the medium.

Top Gun: Maverick – The effects in Joseph Kosinski’s high-flying action picture are very good, but more than anything, this film’s appearance among these nominees is just the latest, almost undeniable argument that the Academy needs a stunt performance Oscar. These days, Tom Cruise films are sold on the fact that he does all of his own stunts, each more death-defying than the last. One of the huge selling points of this film specifically is that the jets are really in the air – real pilots, real speed. Yes, the visual effects make a massive contribution to Maverick’s success, but what the Academy truly wants to reward are the stunts. Maybe someday.

All Quiet on the Western Front – Though the only film in this quintet that would not be considered a huge blockbuster, Edward Berger’s film is still a massive war epic, made all the more impressive by the fact that it was accomplished on a mere $20 million budget. Unfortunately, most of the world did not get to see this Netflix release on the big screen, where its size and scope would be most intensely felt. However, whether in the theater or at home, Berger and his effects team lay the cold reality of war right at your feet in ways we have rarely seen.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – This is one of the more curious nominees in recent years. This is not because it is not deserving but because its Best Picture-nominated predecessor was not cited in this category. Perhaps, Ryan Coogler and his team’s accomplishment in bringing the underwater nation of Talokan to life was too great to ignore. From an effects standpoint, those sequences certainly stand out as some of the most gorgeously rendered in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the nomination is well earned.

The Batman – After years of dreariness and grime, Matt Reeves’ The Batman was a breath of fresh air in the chronicles of the Caped Crusader, a return to the visual inventiveness of the Christopher Nolan or Tim Burton series. Despite being rendered primarily in computers, Gotham City feels real again in a way it has not since The Dark Knight in 2008. There is a visceral quality to the film’s action sequences that gives them more punch than anything in the recent Justice League films.

The final analysis

It’s Avatar: The Way of Water. We can hem and haw and come up with reasons for other winners in this category, but it would be disingenuous. It’s Avatar. Apart from its hamfisted but good-hearted environmental message, this franchise’s entire raison d’être is to push the medium forward into uncharted territory, to show us what brilliant effects properly deployed by a master of the form can truly do. The Academy knows this and will reward it accordingly.

Once again going back to 1977, when Star Wars ushered in the era of the modern special effects film, no filmmaker has directed more movies to the Visual Effects Academy Award than James Cameron. He has five on his resumé: Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Titanic, and Avatar. A sixth will put him two ahead of the next two directors on the list, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, who each have four. Cameron is the undisputed king of the box office, but as his track record proves, he is also the king of visual effects.

Will win: Avatar: The Way of Water

Should win: Avatar: The Way of Water

Should have been here: Bardo

A word on my favorite snub: Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo exists in the dream state between the real and the imagined. It presents heightened reality that is at once familiar and unsettlingly foreign. Like the nominees here, Bardo is an epic, but it is an epic of emotion rather than whiz-bang action. It would be nice to see more of these movies in the category on a regular basis.

Next time: Makeup and Hairstyling