Countdown to the Oscars: Best Visual Effects

Welcome to this year’s edition of Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, where we will break down each of the 23 categories, analyze the films, and make some guesses at their awards prospects.

Best Visual Effects

The nominees are:

The Creator

Godzilla Minus One

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

Napoleon

The Creator

Story-wise, what Hollywood does not need right now is a tale of a benevolent artificial intelligence with which small-minded humans need to learn to get along. It’s not the time for that. But, what is always great to see is a fairly modestly budgeted movie that still looks awesome. Now, an $80 million budget is nothing to sneeze at, but when a couple of the other films nominated in this category cost upward of $200 million, it sounds positively thrifty.

For their money, the filmmakers got a magnificent looking future full of humanoid robots and flying machines. The best effects in this movie are all about the “simulants” (replicants, for all intents and purposes), who look human but for a robotic cranium. The effect reminds of the Oscar-winning work on Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina. It’s pretty cool, and to pull all of this off on the budget they had, the filmmakers should be applauded. And, Hollywood should take note.

Godzilla Minus One

In that context, director Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One is practically a micro-budget film, made for around $10 million to $12 million. You’d never know it. Yamazaki and team bring the titular monster to life in ways many Hollywood blockbusters could never dream. There’s no coy trickery here, either. Godzilla is front and center from the very beginning of this movie, and he looks great. It’s a stunning achievement that borders on the unbelievable.

A couple fun pieces of history come along with this nomination. One, this is the first Godzilla film ever nominated for the Academy Award for Visual Effects, despite the fact that we’ve gotten a number of big-budget Hollywood Godzilla movies over the past 25 years or so. The 1998 Godzilla (Roland Emmerich), the 2014 Godzilla (Garreth Edwards), and the 2021 Godzilla vs. Kong all were shortlisted, but none made the final nomination list. Interestingly, as a franchise, King Kong has actually done quite well, with three nominations and two wins. Not sure what that means.

Another cool bit of trivia here, Yamazaki is just the second director in Academy history to be nominated for a Visual Effects Oscar for his own movie. The other: Stanley Kubrick for 2001: A Space Odyssey, the only Academy Award the legendary director ever won. Not bad company to join.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

We’ve talked about this before but it bears repeating: No film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has won this category. Despite garnering 14 Visual Effects nominations over the years and despite being in many ways the defining blockbuster filmmaking style of the past 20 years, the MCU has not even a single Oscar for effects. That’s kind of remarkable. 

In general, the Academy really likes to lean into Best Picture nominees or, failing that, the most prestigious nominee in the category, which is basically never the MCU entry. Wildly, the only Best Picture nominee from the MCU, Black Panther, did not get nominated for Visual Effects, though the sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, did. Sometimes, we just have to accept that it’s weird.

I don’t think this will be the one to break the streak. The competition is too strong, and though the first two films in this series of course earned nominations, they, like all MCU films before and since them, lost. Vol. 1 lost to Interstellar, while Vol. 2 lost to Blade Runner: 2049. I will say, the effects here in Vol. 3 are quite fun and do a good job bringing the strange little animal experiments at this film’s heart to life.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

As with the Godzilla franchise, no previous Mission: Impossible film had ever been nominated for Best Visual Effects before this. The original film was shortlisted in 1996, while Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, and Fallout also made the shortlists in their respective years. 

I suspect part of the reason for this comes down to Tom Cruise being front and center every time one of these things comes out, touting the practical stunt work involved in making a Mission: Impossible. An unintended consequence of that is to downplay the VFX required. Yes, Tom Cruise rode a motorcycle over a cliff in this film – we all saw the IMAX sizzle reel this past summer, right? – but someone’s gotta go in there and erase that pesky ramp he rode up.

Napoleon

The battle sequences in Ridley Scott’s historical epic are truly grand and look great up on screen, but they are the exact kind of scenes that require visual effects to pull off these days. It’s just not practical anymore to do it practically. Case in point, the production reportedly used around 100 real horses, but there are thousands of horses on screen, many suffering horrible fates. And, kudos to Scott for faking it rather than putting any real animals in harm’s way.

The final analysis

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict Godzilla Minus One. There are a few reasons for this. First, it’s a truly deserving winner. The effects are amazing. Second, the budget factor that we talked about is well known in the industry, and the effects team will get a lot of credit for what it accomplished. Third, the movie was a big ol’ box office hit. It made $56 million at the domestic box office, becoming the highest-grossing Japanese language film ever in the U.S. I’m betting this story is just too fun for voters to pass up.

Will win: Godzilla Minus One

Should win: Godzilla Minus One

Should have been here: Poor Things

A note about my favorite snub: I actually don’t have a problem with any of these nominees and would be hard-pressed to choose which one I would leave out in favor of Yorgos Lanthimos’ film, but this is as good a place as any to shout out the magnificent work of the Poor Things effects team in blending the practical sets with the necessary VFX to create the world of the movie.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Sound

Welcome to this year’s edition of Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, where we will break down each of the 23 categories, analyze the films, and make some guesses at their awards prospects.

Best Sound

The nominees are:

The Creator

Maestro

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

Oppenheimer

The Zone of Interest

A couple years ago, I predicted that the merging of the two sound awards (Editing and Mixing) into a single Best Sound Oscar would lead the category to drift toward bigger, more bombastic movies, generally favoring action and war pictures. Largely, that has proven true. In 2021, Dune took home the Sound award (I’ll put $5 on Dune Part II winning this award at next year’s ceremony, too), and last year, Top Gun: Maverick won the prize over a field of mostly big, bombastic action and war movies.

This year, we’ve still got the big, IMAX-ready action and war movies: The Creator, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, and Oppenheimer. There’s also a nominee that could be broadly categorized as a musical: Maestro, taking the Elvis slot from last year. Any of these would be an understandable winner, but this year, a funny thing happened on the way to the Dolby. Namely, The Zone of Interest showed up and ate everyone’s lunch.

Now, I’m not saying Oppenheimer won’t ride its Best Picture momentum to victory here, and it would be a perfectly worthy winner. Christopher Nolan’s film plays with sound in a number of interesting ways, particularly the times when he chooses to drop it out entirely, like during the Trinity test sequence. Oppenheimer’s walk into the gym and speech to the crowd after the successful test is another place where the sound design absolutely shines. It certainly could happen … but that’s not the way the winds have been blowing.

The Zone of Interest is a mostly meditative drama that takes place largely at a single house that happens to share a wall with the most notorious concentration camp of World War II. So, what makes the sound so special? First, if you’ve seen the movie, this is not a question you’re asking. You get it. But, to put it succinctly, the sound is everything. It’s a sonic collage of life and death at the fenceline of an atrocity.

Not only is the sound technically impressive – every sound you hear has been meticulously gathered by the foley team and precision placed by the editors and mixers – but it becomes a key part of the narrative. The sounds of the concentration camp over that wall bleed into the daily lives of the people who live in this house, subtly revealing who has a conscience and who doesn’t.

This happens sometimes when a certain craft on a film is so undeniable it becomes a talking point for everyone who sees the movie. Think the art direction and visual effects of Avatar or the cinematography of Birdman. The more it moves to the forefront of voters’ minds, the more likely an unusual winner is to topple the more traditional nominees in a category.

When I say “more traditional,” of course I mean things like Mission: Impossible, which does feature a truly magnificent soundscape. It’s so easy for the sound in a movie like this to go wrong – the punches are too heavy; the explosions are too big; everything can be just a little too much. Not the case here. Every nominated person on this team has won at least one Academy Award, and three of the four are coming off a win just last year for Top Gun: Maverick.

It should not be overlooked that Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest would be favorites here regardless of everything said above since they are the two Best Picture nominees in the lineup. You have to go back to 2007, when The Bourne Ultimatum won both Sound Editing and Mixing, to find a year when a Best Picture nominee didn’t win at least one of the sound awards. Of course, since the consolidation, a Best Picture nominee has won every time.

So, what’s it going to be? Oppenheimer is great. It’s likely to be a crafts juggernaut, and predicting it to win here would be the safe and easy thing to do. But, I just feel something brewing with The Zone of Interest. In about a week, we’ll see if that hunch pays off.

Will win: The Zone of Interest

Should win: The Zone of Interest

Should have been here: Killers of the Flower Moon

A note about my favorite snub: I would call it a mild surprise that Martin Scorsese’s western epic missed out on a nod here. The crafts are, of course, impeccable, and the sound is no exception to that. This film seamlessly blends the natural world with the world of machinery and menace, all while incorporating Robbie Robertson’s brilliant score and never losing an ounce of clarity. Wonderful work.

Year in Review: The Best Moments and Quotes of 2023

Moments and quotes. Quotes and moments. I’ve gone back and forth over the years between which column I write for the Year in Review series. For the films of 2020, I did both because 2020 was a strange year, but that piece felt good to write. Some years, there just are more moments that stand out, and in others, there are more quotes. Why not celebrate both, especially because this is my game played by my rules? So, I give you the combined column on the quotes I couldn’t stop thinking about and the moments I couldn’t stop replaying in my mind.

As is tradition, before getting on to the top choices, here are a few more moments (and one quote) that I also loved from this year: the 2001: A Space Odyssey homage that opens Barbie; the couple’s first date at the movies in Fallen Leaves; when Leonard meets Wen at the beginning of Knock at the Cabin; the whole atomic bomb detonation sequence in Oppenheimer; the dinner between the Assassin and the Expert in The Killer; and the line, “I ordered more toothpaste,” from The Zone of Interest.

Moments

Moment of the Year

Sandra and Samuel argue in the kitchen. – from Anatomy of a Fall, directed by Justine Triet

A perfect movie scene must function on a number of levels. It should push the story along in some clear way. It should tell you something new about or deepen your understanding of the characters. And, it should have some kind of thematic resonance within the larger point the filmmaker is trying to make. That’s all on top of needing to be well written, well acted, well staged, etc. It is a necessarily high bar to clear. The sequence in which Sandra (Sandra Hüller) and Samuel (Samuel Thiel) argue in their kitchen leaps over the bar. To borrow a phrase, it’s not in the same ballpark as the bar. It’s not even the same sport.

What Triet, her actors, and co-writer Arthur Harari have crafted here is one of the finest scenes of domestic drama ever committed to film. Every element comes together in a way that leaves you changed after viewing it. The dialogue is so sharp and so knowing about the way long-term couples build up resentments and grievances, just waiting for the chance to unleash them for maximum pain. The performances by both actors are otherworldly, tapping into deep wells of both heartache and anger. It is difficult to watch because it feels real and is earned by everything we know about these people already.

For a film about how the truth is virtually impossible to know, Triet is masterful in the way she deploys just enough objectivity to make the audience believe we understand what is happening, then pulls the rug out from under us at the last possible moment. We see an argument. We believe we understand these people. But, no one can ever understand what is really going on in someone else’s marriage, and that is the ultimate point of the movie. We can never understand.

Four more moments that stood out this year

The campers perform Joan Still. – from Theater Camp, directed by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman

I love a good “puttin’ on a show” movie, from The Muppets to The Blues Brothers. Theater Camp is a film about people whose whole lives are dedicated to puttin’ on a show, and put on a show they do. The show within a show here is Joan Still, a silly, intentionally try-hard musical about the beloved founder of the titular camp. It’s over the top and strange and barely coherent, but it’s earnest and funny and joyous, too. It is the culmination of everything the movie has been about, and it’s catchy, to boot. Just try getting “Camp Isn’t Home” out of your head for days afterward.

Lizzy Q meets her ancestors in the afterlife. – from Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese

In general, the Scorsese style is associated with quick cuts, big camera movements, and a helluva lot of violence. Killers of the Flower Moon has those things. But, what it also has is the other side of the Scorsese style: a deep connection to the spiritual world. When the matriarch of an Osage family being infiltrated by white usurpers dies, there is a funeral. We have seen this before, but in the middle of the ceremony, the dead woman opens her eyes and stands up. She sees her ancestors, who smile at her. She smiles back and is taken gently into the next world. It is one of the most subtle, beautiful flourishes in the entire Scorsese filmography.

Ethan Hunt rides a motorcycle off a cliff. – from Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, directed by Christopher McQuarrie

The Mission: Impossible movies, as they exist today, are largely constructed around showcasing one jaw-dropping stunt. Of course, there are many stunts in these movies, many of them tremendous, but there is always the big one. The Burj Khalifa climb in Ghost Protocol. The HALO jump in Fallout. Hanging onto the plane in Rogue Nation. 

The thing is that the Paramount marketing department knows it has to sell the big stunt, so the motorcycle jump that takes place late in Dead Reckoning Part One was all over the place in advance of the film coming out. If you saw a movie at an IMAX theater over the summer, you probably saw the behind-the-scenes sizzle reel of how they filmed the stunt, performed by Tom Cruise himself, as always. 

There was no avoiding knowing about the stunt going into the film. So, here’s how good the stunt is: The advanced knowledge didn’t matter. It played like gangbusters. In my theater, at least, you could hear a pin drop when Cruise went over the edge of the cliff. Those couple seconds of silence were followed by a round of audible gasps and wows. That’s the magic of movies.

Doris Von Erich dresses for another funeral. – from The Iron Claw, directed by Sean Durkin

Much of Durkin’s epic tragedy is necessarily masculine, following as it does the lives of four brothers whose goal in life is to please their domineering father. But, the most heartbreaking scene in the film revolves around the two women at the center of the story: Doris Von Erich (Maura Tierney) and her daughter-in-law, Pam (Lily James).

Another of Doris’ sons has died tragically, and she is meant to be preparing for the funeral. However, Pam walks in to find her staring at a black dress laid out on the bed. Doris doesn’t want to put it on. She is afraid people will recognize it as the same dress from the last funeral she attended for one of her sons. Pam is supportive, but there is no getting around the weight of this realization. There have been too many funerals, and there is too much tragedy to bear.

Quotes

Quote of the Year

“This is what adults do.” – from May December, written by Alex Mechanik and Samy Burch

At its core, May December is a movie about three people playing pretend. One woman (Natalie Portman) is an actress, whose job is to pretend. Another woman (Julianne Moore) is a wife and mother pretending she has a perfect life filled with love. The man (Charles Melton) is a boy pretending to be a man. The drama of the film comes in the way these characters’ delusions bump up against one another until they can no longer pretend they are anything but what they are.

When the actress and the boy finally have their affair, as we knew they would, she is taking advantage of him in the way that he has always been taken advantage of by his wife. When he seems hurt by her, she tells him, “This is what adults do,” and we understand how little his life has prepared him for the trials of navigating the adult world. He is stunted by his trauma, so of course she must tell him how the adult world operates. He is only in this moment realizing he never had a chance to learn, and that realization is heartbreaking.

Three more quotes that stood out this year

“You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?” – from The Holdovers, written by David Hemingson

The old professor (Paul Giamatti) explains to his two unlikely companions (Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary and Dominic Sessa as Angus) that he hopes one day to finish his monograph on Carthage. “A monograph is like a book but shorter,” he explains. Mary knows what a monograph is, and Angus asks why he doesn’t just write a book. “I don’t know if I have a whole book in me,” he responds. At which point, Mary drops the devastating line: “You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?”

The professor has lived almost his entire life on this campus. He cannot see beyond the world that is right in front of him, or more accurately, he has shut himself off to anything beyond that world. He believes himself to be content, but he is not. He lives a limited life because he does not believe himself capable of living anything else. Mary sees this. Angus sees this. Over the course of the movie, he will finally see it, too.

“The turnover rate for footmen is notoriously high.” – from Saltburn, written by Emerald Fennell

The sheltered rich kid Felix (Jacob Elordi) argues with his cousin Fairleigh (Archie Madekwe) about his privilege and blindness to the world. Fairleigh wants money from Felix and is attempting to guilt him, but it doesn’t make him wrong. Fairleigh accuses Felix of not knowing the names of his footmen, to which Felix replies with this all-time great excuse: “The turnover rate for footmen is notoriously high.”

On its face, this is hilarious and got a good-sized laugh from the audience in my theater. But, it’s deeper than that. It is important to note that Felix says this with no irony. He is incapable of irony, so it would not occur to him to question why the turnover rate for footmen is so high. Perhaps that begins with not knowing their names and treating them as subhuman. That the turnover rate would be “notoriously” high suggests this is a commonly known problem among an entire class of elites who are just as clueless as Felix. They cannot see what is glaringly obvious, which is a weakness Fennell digs in on for maximum effect.

“You think I see two roads.” – from Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, directed by Rob Reiner

This is a bit of a cheat since this comes from a documentary and the line is not written. Rather, it is spoken by the subject of the documentary, Alber Brooks, but Reiner had the good sense to leave it in the film, so here we are. Reiner, in fact, ends his tribute to the great comedian and filmmaker by giving Brooks the last word with this statement. 

Brooks is talking about an agent asking him why he always chooses the most difficult path in his career, and Brooks says, “You think I see two roads. I don’t. … I see one road.” In Brooks’ position as an artist, this makes perfect sense. Make the art you want to make and accept no substitutes. But, for the rest of us, this is also true. Yes, we have choices in life, but those choices are guided by so many outside forces that it becomes more the illusion of choice. There is only one road, and it goes only one direction, which is to say this is the only life we get, and all we can do is our best.

Check back next time for Part V of Last Cinema Standing’s Year in Review series as we close out our look back with the Top 10 Films of 2023.

Now Watch This: Assault on Precinct 13

By Sean Patrick Leydon

Contributor

The Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by a group of natives.

The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says, “Indians. Indians all around! Well, Tonto, ol’ Kimosavee, it looks like we’re finished.”

Tonto replies: “What you mean … ‘We?’”

– Mad Magazine No. 38 (1958)

Modern action films are much more predictable than their predecessors. With many action movies containing similar pacing and messages, the genre has become thoroughly homogenized. What makes Saving Private Ryan feel similar to Mission Impossible or other action films? They bombard the senses with big, flashy action sequences, and they pull at many of the same heartstrings: family, honor, respect, martial prowess, patriotism, etc.

Today, we’re taking a look at John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. It covers a lot of genres: cop flick, drama, thriller, cult. These days, we’d call it action, but now, that implies top-tier CGI budgets and the slickest editing known to man. Assault is different. Its moments of violence are more sickening and human. The feeling of the film is akin to Crash being bludgeoned over the head with Night of the Living Dead – a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of gang violence and racial tension.

There’s a trend in recent action films to ignore a character's ethnicity until it can become the subject of a shallow joke. I see this often when action films have a gang of heroes from racially diverse backgrounds, as in the remake of The Italian Job when Mark Wahlberg introduces his crew. We meet a crew of stylin’ white men with cool specialties and one black guy who likes to blow stuff up. It’s easy to pick on a flashy action movie, but do you remember that one time in Full Metal Jacket? When the troops are negotiating with a prostitute and the black soldier becomes the butt of the “too beaucoup” joke? Amid the horror of war and mounds of existential searching, Kubrick manages to find room for a well-hung black man joke.

There is a different atmosphere in Assault. The actors are different shades, but race is addressed in more serious and realistic ways. As Ethan, a black lieutenant, familiarizes himself with the police station he just took command of, the white receptionist Leigh asks him if he would like coffee. As Ethan accepts her offer, she asks, “Black?” to which he responds with a smile and says, “For over 30 years.” The joke falls on its ass with her. There’s no ribaldry. The conversation just continues as they get to know each other.

Another aspect that sets Assault apart is a sense of equality between the law and the outlaw. Criminals and police are both capable of bumbling stupidity or impressive insight into the real world, and this holds true in Carpenter’s vision. This pleases me to no end. The relentless othering of antagonists in film grosses me out. The distillation of conflict into a Smart Good Guy-Dumb Bad Guy binary is neither inclusive of what we observe in life nor conducive to good storytelling. Still, this staid form of conflict has become the expectation of the action genre.

The film opens with a negative depiction of police. As the film progresses, we meet characters we like and dislike on either side of the law. Conflicts blossom among many characters and groups, and we encounter the kind of classic inter-group conflict that arises in every zombie siege flick.

On a filmmaking level, parts of the film read as both more brutal and quainter than other similar films. Some of this is due to the inventiveness of Carpenter, while some of it is due to the era in which it was made. Of the many subtle aspects of Assault that set it apart from the action genre, my favorite is the treatment death receives. When characters die in action movies, we are accustomed to melodrama: “Tell my wife thing X,” or pulling the pin on the grenade, whatever. There’s a brief second life in which dying characters set things right in the world. In Assault, when you die, your ruined body falls to the ground – because you are dead, and that is what dead people do.

Mad Magazine No. 38 (1958); drawing by E. Nelson Bridwell

We’re familiar with rhythm in action films as simple as: The terrorists did X, so the commandos must complete Y. The sense of foreboding that Assault manages is largely due to the mysterious motivations of its silent antagonists. The result is that the film feels like less of a gimme and more layered with dread than other films. The violence depicted in Assault is random and chaotic. In action films, the main draw is the risk of death and how our hero overcomes it, but the hero is always aware of the source of the danger.

In Assault, characters die in the middle of mundane chores, unaware of the risks they were running being in an action film. Some of the tensest action occurs when Leigh needs to free prisoners so they can help fight off invading gang members. The pacing and editing do no let up. Everything needs to happen at exactly the right time, or our heroes die. The sequence brings together all of the film’s major themes – race, the threat of violence, the commonalities between cops and criminals – and the ultimate message is interesting. Teamwork is important. At one point, Leigh turns to Wells, a prisoner she has freed who is tempted to make a run for it. She says: “No sides to it. We’re all together.” A far cry indeed from “What you mean … ‘We?’”

Sean Patrick Leydon is a photographer, artist, and contributor to Last Cinema Standing. You can check out more of his work at nonotthought.blogspot.com.