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.
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