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 Makeup and Hairstyling

The Grand Budapest Hotel is the likely frontrunner for the Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

Each day as we make our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

The nominees are:

Foxcatcher

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Guardians of the Galaxy

Just about every year, there is grumbling about this category, and the complaints usually go something like this: The Academy Awards are the prestige film awards the world over, they should honor the best the film world has to offer, and under no circumstances should a film like Norbit end up anywhere near the Oscar ceremony. This logic is flawed in so many ways, but it is a topic that comes up all the time.

Yes, films such as Norbit, The Lone Ranger, Click, and Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa can call themselves Academy Award nominated, and something like The Nutty Professor (1996) can even slap “Oscar winner” on the DVD cover if someone in the marketing department so chooses, all thanks to this category. You know what? That is awesome.

I mentioned before how the cinematographers’ branch is willing to look outside the box for nominees. Well, meet the poster child branch for that idea. Prestige does not get an automatic pass. It is about the quality of the work and nothing else, which is as it should be. Also, I like to think about it this way: For every The Nutty Professor, there is an Oscar for The Fly or An American Werewolf in London. Sounds just fine to me.

In any event, no such complaints should be heard this year as all three nominated films are critically well regarded successes of one kind or another. Unlike many years in which there is a lone nominee in the category, all of this year’s contenders popped up in at least one other category, suggesting widespread love for each of them. The Academy tends to like old-age makeup, and barring the kind of transformative creature effects of someone like Rick Baker, they tend to reward the film with the most prestige that also features the most makeup, which brings us to our frontrunner.

The Grand Budapest Hotel – Though clearly well liked by the Academy as a whole, this is a bit of a surprise nominee, given the more flashy contenders such as Maleficent and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I that were left on the sidelines. Still, now that it is on the shortlist, it is in the driver’s seat for this award. It is the most nominated film of the bunch, it is a Best Picture nominee, and the work is impeccable.

This is Frances Hannon’s first nomination, but partner Mark Coulier is a previous winner in this category for helping turn Meryl Streep into Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. The old-age makeup on Tilda Swinton in this film is as transformative, if not more so. Swinton is unrecognizable as Madame D., the elderly woman having an affair with Ralph Fienne’s concierge M. Gustave. Her hair is huge, her skin is sagging and wrinkled, and yet we never once question the reality of the transformation.

In addition, Hannon and Coulier do much more subtle work throughout the film, particularly on Fiennes and Willem Dafoe’s Jopling, a hired thug with distinctively bad teeth. To me, as good as the work on Swinton is, it is the Fiennes makeup that impresses most. He is an aesthete to his core. There is neither a blemish on his skin nor a hair out of place on his head. The makeup goes a long way toward creating the character Fiennes so well embodies.

Guardians of the Galaxy – If the award were for most makeup, this would win in a walk. Alas, it is not, but the makeup concocted by Elizabeth Yianni-Georgiou and David White goes a long way toward grounding many of the film’s more fantastical beings in a believable reality. Main characters such as Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Drax (Dave Bautista) can exist in this world as a green woman and a blue man covered in tattoos, respectively, because the universe they inhabit allows for it. Yianni-Georgiu and White’s work is partly to thank for that.

According to the film’s star, Chris Pratt, Bautista’s makeup took up to five hours daily to apply and another hour and a half to remove, a process that included applying and removing 18 prosthetic tattoo pieces. The effort shows up on screen as Drax appears as a fully formed character before he even speaks a word, just judging by the lifetime of tattoos he has acquired. For Gamora, the look of Saldana’s character is created almost entirely through makeup, a tremendous commitment by both the actor and the crew to a project that often as not is completed through CGI these days.

Foxcatcher – That nose. There is actually a ton of great, subtle makeup and hairstyling work in this film, but I promise the only thing anyone remembers is the prosthetic nose worn by Steve Carell as John du Pont. If I am being honest – and I have no reason to lie to you fine folks – I found the nose distracting. There is a great exchange in Ocean’s Thirteen in which Matt Damon, who is wearing a fake nose as part of a con, defends his choice as “not just a prop for prop’s sake.” Carell’s performance is too good to hide behind a fake nose. It is a prop for prop’s sake.

The shame is that the rest of the makeup and hairstyling in the film is incredible, from the cauliflower ears on wrestling brothers Mark (Channing Tatum) and David Schultz (Mark Ruffalo) to the ghostly pallor of du Pont’s skin. Makeup artists Bill Corso, a previous Oscar winner for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Dennis Liddiard do an amazing job of bringing three very real people to the screen. It would be a disservice to their accomplishment to boil it down to a big nose, but to be fair, it is a damn big nose.

The final analysis

Ultimately, any one of these three films could win, and each would be deserving to one extent or another, but the overall support for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel will probably be enough to carry the day here. Guardians of the Galaxy is a definite challenger just based on the sheer amount of effort that shows through on screen, and Foxcatcher is probably bringing up the rear, which is simply an indication of the high quality on display in the category this year.

Will win: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Should win: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wish it had been here: Noah

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Visual Effects

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is up for Best Visual Effects at the Oscars.

Each day as we make our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

  

Best Visual Effects

The nominees are:

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Guardians of the Galaxy

Interstellar

X-Men: Days of Future Past

I am willing to bet this is the category for which the highest percentage of you have seen all the nominees. Just statistically, that must be true, as these are all multi-million-dollar blockbuster hits. Christopher Nolan’s space-set epic had the lowest domestic gross of these with a hefty $186 million. Guardians of the Galaxy was a surprise breakout hit for Marvel Studios, which also had a hand in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and a smaller part in bringing X-Men: Days of Future Past to the screen.

On top of gigantic budgets and huge box-office totals, the other thing these films have in common is that they are effects-driven pictures. They are stories about events that could only be told through the use of special effects – though an argument could be made for a much lower budget version of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, but we will table that discussion for another day.

Missing from this list are films such as Birdman or The Imitation Game, in which the effects are more seamlessly integrated into the visual experience of the film, effects meant to go unnoticed. In each of these nominated films, the effects are part of the draw, part of the spectacle, part of the experience.

Ultimately, this comes down to what “best” means in the context of visual effects. Is it the film with the most effects? Best integration? The one that pushes the medium forward? I tend to lean toward a combination of the last two, while the Academy often chooses the highest quality film that also happens to feature a great deal of effects work. For me, those are one in the same this year, so we will begin our analysis there.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes – Visual effect supervisor Joe Letteri has been nominated for 10 Academy Awards, mostly for his work with Peter Jackson on the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films. He also won this award for his groundbreaking work with James Cameron on Avatar. To me, however, his office will always be one Oscar short. Unbelievably, in 2011, Rise of the Planet of the Apes lost to the crowd-pleasing but nowhere-near-as-revolutionary effects of Hugo. This is the Academy’s chance to make up for that oversight and reward a series that is pushing the very boundaries of visual effects.

The hurdle it faces is that actors – the largest voting body in the Academy, a theme that will come up more than once as break down each category – are mostly afraid of motion capture technology. To their minds, what good are actors when a performance can be created digitally? It is flawed logic at best, and there is no better argument against that than the work of the immensely talented Andy Serkis as Caesar in these films. If his performance is not acting, then they need to change the definition of the word. The computers convincingly make him an ape, but Serkis makes Caesar a character.

Everything Letteri and his team touch is absolutely gorgeous, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is one of the most beautiful films of the year, effects-driven or not. Letteri will not be hurting for Oscars. His four other statues can keep him company, but the Apes series deserves recognition for pushing forward the worlds of performance capture and visual effects.

Interstellar – The chief competition to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and the probable winner is this Nolan misfire. I am on the record as not being of fan of this film, which is a mild way of saying Interstellar is utter nonsense. However, it is nonsense that is more often than not impressive to look at. It is big, it is flashy, and thanks to Nolan sitting in the director’s chair, it has the air of prestige about it. It is the exact kind of film the Academy likes to award.

Effects supervisor Paul Franklin and his team mix computer and practical effects to create a wholly imagined visual landscape, taking us to new worlds light years away. The problem – and this is Nolan’s problem as well – is that these new worlds are so boring and unimaginative. With a literal universe of possibilities, they invent an ice planet, a water planet, and a desert planet.

More intriguing is the climatic tesseract sequence, in which Franklin and Nolan concoct a setting that exists outside of space and time. If only the rest of the film had as much creativity, it could have been a much different experience.

Guardians of the Galaxy – Despite all that, one can never count out a well liked box-office hit in this category, and Guardians of the Galaxy certainly qualifies in that respect. Like Interstellar, much of the film is set on extraterrestrial worlds, but unlike Interstellar, visual effects supervisor Stephane Ceretti and his crew seem to have some fun with their designs. Bouncing from operatic space battles to stunningly rendered interiors, the visual effects help sustain the joy ride that is Guardians of the Galaxy.

In addition, the character animation is a marvel to behold, if you will forgive the pun. Rocket Raccoon and Groot are characters that have entered the cultural lexicon, and a large part of the reason is how believably brought to life they are by the character animators. Guardians of the Galaxy is a fun movie that people enjoyed, and that experience cannot be underestimated when it comes to voters looking at a list and checking off a box.

X-Men: Days of Future Past – The only real knock against this picture is that it does not quite stand up to the level of the above-mentioned films or to the previous films in its own series. The major effects set piece is the moving of a baseball stadium through the air, a feat which does not have the visual flare of something like the Bay of Pigs invasion in X-Men: First Class or the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge in X-Men: Last Stand. It is fine work but will not stick in audience’s minds after they leave the theater.

The flipside of that is the character work on the mutants, which has always been this series’ bread and butter. Visual effects supervisor Richard Stammers, who helped create the Oscar-nominated effects on Prometheus, including the look of that film’s engineers, and his team have a blast with each of the mutants here, particularly with the shape-shifting Mystique and massive sentinels. This is good work. It just is not the best work of the year.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier – This is the most surprising of the nominees, especially given directors Joe and Anthony Russo’s stated intention to use as little CGI as possible. In viewing the film, that dictum seems mostly adhered to, save for a climactic final battle aboard floating warships. Most impressive are the little details, including some high-quality computer screen work, a small thing that often goes unnoticed but adds so much when done well.

Undoubtedly, visual effects supervisor Dan Deleeuw and crew are able to put that effort into details due to the lack of extreme character work throughout the film. Unlike the Hulk or Thor or Iron Man, Captain America does not really have traditional superpowers. He does not transform into anything. He does not fly. He is a man whose natural human abilities are enhanced to super-human levels. The result of this is that there is not a lot of opportunity to use big, flashy effects – at least as Marvel Studios films go – which will hurt it in the voting.

The final analysis

This probably comes down to the film with the most overall Academy support, which is Interstellar, given its five nominations total. The only other film here with a nomination in multiple categories in Guardians of the Galaxy, which is also nominated for Best Makeup. Interstellar, however, has nominations in both sound categories, in production design, and in music, which suggests broad support from a number of Academy branches.

Will win: Interstellar

Should win: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Wish it had been here: Birdman