There are a lot of reasons to love the VFX race, but one of the best is that it's the rare race that you can actually predict relatively far in advance. Every year you will see over-eager young Oscar pundits online claim that "so-and-so" is a lock just based on festival heat (last year, I recall getting in an argument with someone on Twitter about Danielle Brooks being a "lock" for a win right after the first festival screening when she barely got nominated in the end), but with Visual Effects, the field is a lot easier to course. There are films that are released later in the year (surprisingly, in the past three years, a majority of the films were given their wide release after October 6th, despite us thinking of visual effects as a "summer blockbuster" thing), but you can generally see them coming. Pictures like Dune and Avatar: The Way of Water are not hard to avoid. This is also a category you can throw around words like "lock" (especially for nominations) pretty early, as a certain type of prestigious, gorgeous visual effects film can become a surefire nominee or even winner not far after its release.
So, given this, I thought it would be fun to be on record with my predictions (still early-these are not set-in-stone) of the contenders for this year's Visual Effects race. Any other field I would be embarrassing myself saying this this early, but here...I feel like I've got pretty good odds. I'm going to focus on the "shortlist" rather than the predictions, both because that allows us to talk about more films and it allows a direct comparison to when I did this last year (admittedly, I did it in November that year, but I did predict 60%...though I embarrassingly missed the eventual winner).
The first thing we can say, with confidence, is that Dune: Part Two is going to be nominated. Much of the 2020's, quite frankly, could get really boring in this category as Dune and Avatar switch off winning (for the record...Avatar 2 would've crushed either Dune if they'd been head-to-head). The film is a serious contender for a Best Picture nomination, and while that isn't always a guarantee of victory (see last year's Poor Things for a good example of this)...this isn't missing. I don't see a world where Dune isn't nominated, much less shortlisted. I'd go so far as to say that I barely see a world where it doesn't win this category outright.
If it does lose, the only other option is Gladiator II. I don't normally add in films that haven't been released yet to the "sure thing" category, but I feel pretty confident here in making the case for Gladiator. The original won this category (much like Dune), and while the film will struggle to live up to the same level of accomplishment that the first movie did (I mean, when your bar to clear is winning Best Picture & Best Actor, you're going to fall short), missing the VFX shortlist, particularly given how close it'll be to the film's release date...I don't see it, even if the film is panned by the critics, it still makes the shortlist. So I'm going to risk being a fool here and saying it's a sure thing.
The final sure thing is Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Again, this is where I will remind you (unlike Dune and Gladiator) that this is a shortlist prediction. Given its early release date, and good (but not great) box office, it'd be easy to forget this film in the nominations list, and it could be a surprise snub. But it was generally well-regarded, it looks fantastic (something we can't say for a lot of blockbusters this year), and the last three were all literally nominated for Academy Awards...I don't see how it misses the nomination, and honestly, I would be super surprised if it doesn't make the final five before all is said-and-done, unless a lot of the upcoming movies really click. So let's assume those films take up three of our ten slots.
Gladiator II is obviously the most important film coming out this fall in this race, the only film that's a legitimate threat to take down Dune in its quest for a second VFX statue. But that doesn't mean we don't have other films approaching that could reach the other seven slots. I count five films that feel like they are in the quandary of "will this be VFX-heavy enough?" and "will the Academy notice?"
Look at a film like Blitz, which will have a lot of subtler special effects that could make sense if the film is a major contender for Best Picture as it's expected to be. I think the question here is if it's going to be too subtle. Frequently films with supporting effects can't quite cut it through the shortlisting process (supporting effects do not hold up well based on the way that they structure the shortlisting process), and so this is where I shouldn't be writing this article, because seeing the film would help me a great deal. But know this is in the conversation, as is Nosferatu, though I have less faith in that making it to the end mostly because horror films rarely get into VFX despite them being foundational to modern movies.
Two films getting a lot more heat are Here and Better Man. Here makes sense. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, it has a lot of the things that the Academy loves lately, including de-aging (that helped The Irishman, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and Captain Marvel all make the shortlists), though Zemeckis films can have a plastic-y sheen that can hurt them (also, his movies are much more combative when it comes to reviews...again, why I normally would write this around Thanksgiving when I have a better feel of the films). Better Man is also an option, given the motion-capture aspect, but I'm going to be honest-are we really to be expected that there will be two films featuring motion-capture suits and a guy who is actually an ape? I mean, doesn't that feel repetitive? Similar to Here, one wonders how critics will react to this (and even if they like it, is this too weird for Oscar?).
The final film is one that will get a lot of attention, and is our last real threat this year for a third billion-dollar movie: Wicked. Here we can see a lot of the effects, and to my eye they look super gaudy. But here's a dirty secret-when you're predicting the shortlist specifically, more is more. Frequently the films that make the shortlist but don't get to Oscar are movies that have a lot of special effects, regardless of the ultimate quality of them (all three Jurassic World films, for example, made it even though none actually got nominated). I would bet that Wicked is probably going to make it onto the shortlist even if it's a harder sell for a nomination.
Now we get into the backbone of the shortlist: sequels & comic book films. Since the release of Iron Man, every single year that had an MCU film eligible ultimately ended up with at least one MCU film getting a shortlist citation. This year, there's only one MCU film in contention, and it's arguably the only comic book film in the conversation (Madame Web and Joker 2 both crashed-and-burned, and aren't going to be making noise here, and I doubt Venom: The Last Dance breaks DC's losing streak), given its box office: Deadpool & Wolverine. Deadpool has never made a shortlist (the first one made the longlist), and while five Wolverine-featured films have made the shortlist (X-Men: Days of Future Past got nominated), none of those were his three standalone pictures. This could be a break of a long-time streak...though with that box office, you'd assume Disney will push for it.
The rest of the films don't have the same statistic stakes, though inevitably some of these sequels will get into the shortlist because you have to fill it with something (in the past three years, 67% of the VFX shortlisted films were either sequels or comic book movies). Two sequels to films nominated for Oscars in the past include Twisters, a summer blockbuster that was critically-respected and did well domestically, and Mufasa, the sequel to The Lion King that it seems like Disney is pretending isn't happening even though the last one made a billion dollars (conversation around this feels muted, doesn't it?). Either one of them could make the list.
Further down, you've got Furiosa, a film that had a high-profile whiff at the box office, but the last one was nominated for Best Visual Effects, and this movie, at the very least, is gorgeous (it certainly should be in the Top 10). Godzilla x Kong is also an option, but the last one made the shortlist but missed an expected nomination, and they literally just gave a Godzilla film the Oscar last year...I feel like this will be a spread-the-wealth situation. The same can be said for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which couldn't get in for Afterlife, and this one was such a tiny blip on the summer it's hard to imagine the Academy caring.
That leaves us with Alien: Romulus. Here's the deal with Alien: Romulus. First, it was a proper hit, unlike a lot of the films I just name-checked who were in the middle-grossing $350 million, this will easily get a sequel and Hollywood definitely noticed it made money even if the public didn't. Also, it's made by both Industrial Light & Magic and Weta, two of the biggest VFX houses in the industry...this is the sort of inside baseball stuff that gets you on the shortlist even if people aren't expecting it (and honestly, gets you a surprise nomination...calling that one now that we're underestimating this as an option).
The Visual Effects category can feature a lot of different surprises if you over-excel at a certain thing, and there's usually at least one shortlist contender that you didn't really see coming. A few films that warrant mention even if I don't ultimately think they get them are going in this "Odds & Ends" section.
The box office on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and A Quiet Place: Day One, for example, is really hard to ignore (as is A Quiet Place being from ILM), though neither is an obvious contender for this and their franchises aren't favorites of this category. On the opposite end, the practical effects on display in The Fall Guy would totally get it in as something different, but it bombed in a major fashion, and so it's hard to see Oscar caring that much (Hollywood would like to pretend this never happened). Animated films like Transformers One and Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim could make it, but they are a bit out of Oscar's comfort zone (usually only stop-motion animation gets onto the shortlist), and the handsomeness of Horizon would be a potential place for a nomination if, like The Fall Guy, it hadn't been a box office disappointment.
The one film that might be under-estimated here is IF, which got mixed reviews and only middling box office, but it has a lot of animation alongside starry actors, and has the aura of a film that nearly makes this, or is at least considered. This wouldn't be in a Top 10 list of contenders for a nomination...but for the shortlist, I'd consider it.
My Final Shortlist Predictions (Alphabetical)
With all that said, here is my current predictions for the ten shortlisted Visual Effects films:
Alien: Romulus
Better Man
Deadpool & Wolverine
Dune: Part Two
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Gladiator II
Here
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Twisters
Wicked
There's a few things that feel a bit on the edge here, specifically Better Man, Here, and Deadpool, the first two because I haven't seen them and they could be soundly rejected by the public (in a way that would mean they never get in here, and are replaced with something more conventional), while Deadpool I'm including solely due to the MCU connection and its billion-dollar gross. The movies that feel like I'm missing by not including are Blitz, Mufasa, and IF, in that order, but all of them I have confidence issues with...the former two could make up for that with good public reception. I'll leave it there, but share in the comments what you think-who do you think are the ten films shortlisted for the Oscar?
No comments:
Post a Comment