This past week, the major blockbuster film Dune was pulled from the 2020 film schedule, moving back to 2021. This has been a consistent move all year. Everything from No Time to Die (the latest Bond flick) to Marvel's Black Widow to the franchise reboot Top Gun: Maverick have all moved as a result of Covid-19, which is causing sluggish box office sales, and movies with gigantic budgets are unable to cope. We've seen that with Tenet failing to return people to movie theaters, and many major films moving to streaming platforms, though with big-budget flicks, it's harder to do that since the movies won't recoup their balance if we're watching them on a streaming platform.
This has led to one of the bigger conversations on Film Twitter in the past few weeks, namely around the Oscars. Provided the Oscars still happen under the current calendar (considering how many movies have pulled out, I honestly think they should just revert back to the calendar year like they initially intended to do), there are a few categories that feel unnaturally light (Supporting Actress, Cinematography), but none, because of the lack of major blockbusters this year, feels as light as Visual Effects. This has led to a cascade of random predictions & thoughts about the race, and since I wanted to join the fun (while everything about this sucks, it's worth at least seeing the silver lining of some under-sung film elements potentially not getting washed away this year by flashier, mega-budget flicks), I figured I'd talk through the Visual Effects race this year, first by discussing the "will they be released?" movies, then moving into the sure things, and the "only in 2020" style nominations.
The biggest question mark (for me) as the rest of the year winds down is whether or not Wonder Woman 1984 will stay in its current slot, or continue the trend of moving blockbusters back. While there are a few major films still on the docket for the rest of the year, no movie would be risking more than this surefire hit (it made bank on its first outing, and would be a guaranteed goliath in normal times) if it came out. The first Wonder Woman somehow didn't get nominated for any Oscars, but my gut says that the Academy would be willing to cut this movie some slack if it tried to save the theatrical industry later this year by coming out regardless of its reviews...I just don't know if that will happen.Other films that are in that same category include Free Guy (which features a lot of visual effects based on the trailer where Ryan Reynolds is living in a video game), Chaos Walking (a Tom Holland action-adventure), The Green Knight (a spin on the Camelot legend with Dev Patel), and Voyagers (a SciFi space epic with Colin Farrell). While none of these films would be obvious contenders in a normal year, my gut says that if they were to be released & Oscar's timing wouldn't change, we'd probably see 1-2 of them make the cut considering the dearth of obvious contenders. But they have to actually come out in order to make it.
For my money, there are two guaranteed nominees that would make it based on the current cadence. The first of those two is Tenet, which has already been released. Christopher Nolan & Warner Brothers took a huge risk, one that didn't fully pay off, when they pushed this movie into theaters (with no streaming options), and the industry will want to reward that. In a different year, my gut says that Tenet would've struggled here since its effects (while cool), aren't as showy as, say, Inception or Interstellar. But in 2020, Tenet is the closest we have to a "normal" nominee in this category, and it's the frontrunner to win until I see some evidence otherwise.
The other nomination that feels pretty secure is The Midnight Sky, starring George Clooney & Felicity Jones. The film is a space epic (always a good thing with Oscar), and looks really solid in photos (a trailer does not seem to have been released yet). This might have been too cheap of a film on its current budget without a heavy prestige push (like, say, Ex Machina got), but it's got one of the surest release dates of the year because it's coming from Netflix. Add in that Clooney is directing (and Clooney's been able to have some success with Oscar in the director's chair), and as long as it's halfway decent, I don't see how this would miss.
Let's assume that I've listed at least three of the nominees, but not five (likely because at least a few of the films I've listed will be delayed). The rest of the field would not be typical for Oscar, and thus we're getting into some weird areas. Unless Mank has more effects that I know about (some seem to think it will based on predictions I'm seeing around the internet), there's no other upcoming major prestige drama that has enough visual effects to warrant inclusion on this list, and so we probably need to pick from movies that have already been released.
That's a challenge because most of Oscar's favorite franchises in this category (aside from effects-laden dramas) don't exist in 2020. There's no titles from Star Wars, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Harry Potter, Transformers, or Star Trek, all of which should surely make it in a weak year. There's not even titles from franchises that Oscar doesn't like but could maybe give a nod to this year (Mission Impossible, Fast & the Furious, and Jurassic World are all absent). The revamped DC Universe hasn't gotten any nominations in Visual Effects yet, but it does have a title (even if Wonder Woman isn't released): Birds of Prey, the latest Harley Quinn feature. However, it's not particularly effects-driven, and would feel like a weird nomination.
The one exception, and therefore the most obvious option that Oscar could go with is Mulan. While the Disney live-action remakes are nowhere near sure things here, they've been able to score actual nominations in competitive years. Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, Christopher Robin, and The Lion King were all nominated for Best Visual Effects, and so it wouldn't feel weird to put Mulan in. I'd argue that Mulan, considering its reviews, would probably be more of an "Aladdin-style miss" in a normal year, but if Oscar is boring in February or keeping it safe, Mulan would be an easy out for this category.
If they don't go with Mulan, or they need more than one here, then it gets wild. Dolittle and Sonic the Hedgehog have CGI (boatloads of it), but wouldn't be within a mile of Oscar in a normal year...but in 2020 it's possible. The same can be said for the boats of Greyhound or the hidden figures of The Invisible Man; both films are classier choices since they had better reviews, but they're mid-budget films in a category that goes big budget. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that we get an animated film here (which has only happened twice, with The Nightmare Before Christmas and Kubo and the Two Strings), specifically Pixar's Onward or (if it's released in time) Soul, but I struggle to see Oscar pulling that even this year. Which gets me to my off-the-wall prediction-I think The Call of the Wild is totally getting nominated in this category. It has a major character (the dog) who is animated the whole movie, which has been a regular feature of this category since The Two Towers, and it has a mix of both practical & computer-generated special effects. In a normal year it would barely make the bakeoff, but as I don't need to remind you-2020 is not a normal year.
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