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 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

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Visual Effects

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