Countdown to the Oscars: Best Visual Effects

The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history, what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.

Best Visual Effects

The nominees are:

Dune

Free Guy

No Time to Die

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Spider-Man: No Way Home

The list of nominees here reflects what the Academy seems to wish all of its categories looked like, full of crowd-pleasing blockbusters that fall somewhere on the spectrum of mediocre but fun to visionary but flawed. The producers of the Oscars, and to a large degree ABC, seem to believe that stuffing the nominations full of movies like these will bring audiences back to the show. Thinking like this how we get stunts like #OscarsFanFavorite.

That is no knock on these films, which I mostly liked, and all are deserving nominees in this category, but one cannot help but imagine a future very close at hand in which Dune Part II leads a Best Picture slate of Marvel sequels and middling action comedies. But I digress. We are here to kick off our category-by-category rundown of the Oscars with a look at Best Visual Effects.

As I sat in the theater watching Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is a fun enough film that pulls out all the stops to entertain us, I really started to think about what the Visual Effects Oscar rewards. It is a question I have grappled with for years, and I never have reached a satisfying answer. 

History has made it clear what Academy members think they are rewarding: the best film, which happens to feature prominent visual effects work. Fair enough, if not quite what I interpret the spirit of the award to be. Shouldn’t Best Visual Effects reward the best work in the category? Which brings us to the more intriguing question: What does “best” look like?

Dune - Is it the seamless integration of photorealistic effects work, bringing to vibrant life worlds and ideas we never imagined? If so, we have Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, with effects by the nominated team of Paul Lambert, Tristan Myles, Brian Connor, and Gerd Nefzer. The film is gorgeous to look at, with the also-nominated production design buoyed by effects that make Caladan and Arrakis real, visceral places. The sandworms are an achievement unto themselves, and despite the multiverses featured in some of the other nominees, this space epic actually has the grandest scope of any film in the category.

Spider-Man: No Way Home - Or does best mean making the impossible possible, realism be damned? Truth be told, it was the bridge fight between Peter and Doc Ock that got me thinking about all this. I would not say the effects look particularly great in this film, but they are definitely integral to world building. These movies do not exist without the effects – in this case, crafted by nominees Kelly Port, Chris Waegner, Scott Edelstein, and Dan Sudick. Perhaps, that should count for something. We got to watch a spider man fight a cyborg, which is not nothing, and it does not happen without the effects.

Free Guy - If we are going instead with flash and pizzazz, then this year, the category belongs to Free Guy, by director Shawn Levy with effects by Swen Gillberg, Bryan Grill, Nikos Kalaitzidis, and Sudick, a double nominee. Free Guy is mostly fun and diverting, interesting maybe only for the fact that “Ryan Reynolds Movie” seems to be its own genre now. About a non-player character who gains sentience in a video game world, the effects are everywhere, and they are of a piece with the film, replicating the open world-style environments of a Grand Theft Auto or the like.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings - This would seem to fall into the same category as fellow Marvel Cinematic Universe nominee Spider-Man, but perhaps with an even greater level of difficulty. In the film’s fantastical final act, nominees Christopher Townsend, Joe Farrell, Sean Noel Walker, and Dan Oliver throw everything at the wall, and most of it sticks. In addition, the Academy is often fond of distinctive creature effects, and the creatures in this film are fun and goofy in a way not often allowed by the genre.

No Time To Die - The supposed final entry in the Daniel Craig James Bond series features solid effects work by Charlie Noble, Joel Green, Jonathan Fawkner, and Christ Corbould, but the 007 franchise will always be better known for its stunt work. Should there be an Oscar for stunt coordinators and performers? Absolutely. But we don’t have that one yet, so for now, we get Bond here in Visual Effects. It is a good film, but not the kind of effects showcase other shortlisted finalists such as Godzilla vs. Kong or The Matrix Resurrections might have been.

The final analysis

This is Dune’s award to lose. Barring the shocking Ex-Machina victory in 2015, which we talk about every time we talk about this category, go with the Best Picture nominee. Spider-Man is a formidable challenger with its big box office and hordes of fans, but when it comes to recognition, that’s what the money’s for. Also, interesting to note that no MCU film has yet to triumph in this category, though Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 – the last time we saw a live-action Doc Ock on screen – was recognized in 2004.

Lambert and Nefzer previously won this award for their work on Villeneuve’s previous film, Blade Runner 2049, while Lambert and Myles were part of the winning team on First Man. Along with first-time nominee Connor, they are all going to need more room on their shelves.

Meanwhile, the question of what “best” means in this category remains open to interpretation, left to each of us to answer on our own. How do you want to be transported at the movies?

Will win: Dune

Should win: Spider-Man: No Way Home

Should have been here: Godzilla vs. Kong

Next time: Makeup and Hairstyling