Predator (1987)

Film: Predator (1987)

Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elpidia Carrilo, Carl Weathers, Richard Chaves, Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura

Director: John McTiernan

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Arnold Schwarzenegger: click here to learn more about Mr. Schwarzenegger (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, like most movie stars, has had his love life pretty well-chronicled, but for most of his time as a movie star, it was largely linked to one woman.  He had dated English teacher Barbara Outland (who would eventually write a rather scathing memoir about their time together when he was running for reelection as governor in 2006) before he started acting regularly, but other than a brief fling with Eleanor Mondale in the late 1970's (when her father was vice president), his primary romantic partner was Maria Shriver, the daughter of Sargent & Eunice Shriver, and the niece of President Kennedy (meaning that Schwarzenegger, a future Republican Governor, did in fact date the scions of two major Democratic families).  Shriver & Schwarzenegger's romance was unconventional, but seemingly happy for much of its run.  They had four children, and their political views (while commonly-known) were largely kept quiet given that Shriver was a journalist at NBC at the time.  There was the fun juxtaposition of Arnold campaigning for George HW Bush in 1988 while Maria's senator uncle Ted was stumping for Michael Dukakis, but by-and-large they presented as a solid couple even though Schwarzenegger was repeatedly cheating on his wife (the unkind maxim about Kennedy women looking the other way on their philandering husbands definitely feeling accurate in this case), until it was outed that Schwarzenegger had father a love child with a maid (a story that conveniently happened when Schwarzenegger's political career was coming to a close).  The couple remained married for a decade after this, though, until 2021.

(Spoilers Ahead) The start of their marriage was happening when Schwarzenegger's film career 

was hitting a new height.  Freed of his contract with Dino de Laurentiis, he was able to start making major action films in the vein of someone like Sylvester Stallone, who at the time was a bigger star than Schwarzenegger in the genre even if that wouldn't last very long.  A big part of that was Predator in 1987, which featured Arnold as Major Dutch Schaefer on a rescue mission in Guatemala.  The film, like much of Arnold's movies of the 1980's, is short on actual plot.  All you need to know is that they are on a mission that will soon be deterred because they are being hunted by an extraterrestrial being that is not really referred to (the title word "predator" is never uttered in the movie).  His crew, one-by-one, is picked off, and it's left to Dutch to try to hunt the Predator largely solo, doing so through covering himself in mud (that disguises the creatures vision), eventually resulting him trapping the creature (and it then exploding itself in hopes of killing them both...which he doesn't).

Let's start with the movie and my thoughts before we talk about two oddities about this film in relation to Arnold's career.  First, it's a pretty good.  This is not Celine and Julie Go Boating or any such intellectual exercise as a picture, but it's solidly constructed and has a terrific special effects-driven bit of construction when it comes to the actual creature, both the invisibility effects and then (when it's revealed) the fantastically gross alien practical effects & makeup.  I also loved the film's Deliverance-style vibes, which honestly the further I get into this season, the more I realize that Deliverance had as much of an influence on action films as The Godfather did on mafia movies or Star Wars did on science-fiction.  The film also has one of my all-time favorite closing credits, which has all of the (mostly now dead) characters showing up again in title cards with the actors' names, all of them grinning cheesily like they're in a Mentos commercial...except Arnold who totally botches the concept by just being stoic.

Two things I want to note before we go here.  First, this stars Jesse Ventura in addition to Arnold Schwarzenegger-he plays heavy gunner Blain Cooper, one of the men who fall victim to the Predator in the film's first hour.  This is one of three films starring the two men, along with The Running Man and Batman & Robin.  Ventura would be elected the Governor of Minnesota in 1998 in one of the biggest upsets in American political history, five years before Schwarzenegger, and while they did not mirror each other stylistically in politics (Arnold was much more successful in the job & won reelection, Ventura was so unpopular he couldn't even run for a second term) they both represented a level of "entertainment being crucial in politics" that would come to a shocking result in 2016 on a national scale.

I will also end with this-the Predator films five sequels/prequels...none of which would feature Schwarzenegger.  Schwarzenegger refused to make the sequel due to a salary dispute.  This was also a deterrent in sequels to Conan the Destroyer, Eraser, Total Recall, and Kindergarten Cop, as well as a long-gestating sequel to Twins.  Not all of these are totally attributable to Schwarzenegger's salary disputes (Twins 2 was lost in development hell for decades and eventually crashed with the death of Ivan Reitman), but it's a testament to Schwarzenegger's ability at the box office that he could forego solid paychecks like this, as well as his alleged difficulty offscreen that would result in studios walking away not thinking he was worth the money (or the effort) even with probable hits on their hands.  Compare this to some of his contemporaries like Steven Seagal, Dolph Lundgren, & especially Sylvester Stallone, when sequels were being made, they tended to feature in them and take the easy paycheck (Jean-Claude van Damme, like Schwarzenegger, tended to not make it through negotiations).  This ended up being a blessing for Schwarzenegger for a while, we'll find with our final two movies, as going for an original concept (and with better directors) made him a much hotter property as a movie star than always needing to go back to the Rocky or Under Siege well.

OVP: Thunderball (1965)

Film: Thunderball (1965)

Stars: Sean Connery, Claudine Auger, Adolfo Celi, Luciana Paluzzi, Rik van Nutter

Director: Terence Young

Oscar History: 1 nod/1 win (Best Visual Effects*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sean Connery: click here to learn more about Mr. Connery (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Our shift from Errol Flynn to Sean Connery in part also shifts us into the modern definition of an action star, and in some ways we should've gone with our next two month's stars (who are far more focused on the 1970's, but wouldn't have much legacy as action stars in the blockbuster sense beyond that), except that if we're going chronologically Connery became famous first.  He also just managed to live long enough as an action star to become a leading man alongside the heyday of the genre in the 1980's & 90's.

But we are shifting into Connery because he defined action in the 1960's, and he did so as the quintessential movie hero: James Bond.  While Bond was originally a book character, in a highly-popular spy series by Ian Fleming (which would eventually have every single novel be brought to the big-screen), Connery's inhabitation of it would make it an essentially cinema-derived product to the minds of billions.  Connery got the role of Bond pretty early in his career.  He was a leading man at that point, having appeared in Darby O'Gill and the Little People (a live-action Disney movie), but he had not had a traditional breakthrough, which would change with the colossal success of Dr. No.  The film would make Connery a household name, but as we'll find in the coming weeks, it was more Bond that would be the household name than Connery himself.

(Spoilers Ahead) Connery would make seven Bond films in his career, and I had before this just seen two (Dr. No and Goldfinger).  We're only going to do one Bond film this month (there's a lot to Connery's career that I want to cover so we won't have time for more), and I didn't want it to be one of his post-1960's pictures, so I kind of just drew a name out of a hat and went with Thunderball (both because of its Oscar win and because I love that Tom Jones theme song).  This film won Bond his first (and to date only) Visual Effects Oscar, and is a story about Bond once again taking on SPECTRE, this time with their #2 leader Emilio Largo (Celi), who is planning on destroying a major US or UK city unless their governments pay him 100 million pounds.  Connery eventually starts to infiltrate the spy's den, all the while bedding a half dozen women, including those closest to Largo, before eventually defeating him with the help of the curvaceous & stylish (seriously, that black-and-white bikini could make a comeback so fast on Instagram if someone wanted to bring it back) Domino, played by Auger.

The movie is not one of Bond's most-celebrated outings, and many clock this as the first weak link in the Connery era of films, generally considered the best until Daniel Craig, and they're right.  Connery is still there, charming and brutishly sexy as ever (the film's now heavily-criticized sexual politics have a cringe moment early on when Connery toes the line with Molly Peters' physiotherapist, eventually having sex with her despite protestations earlier in a steam room), but there's not enough to do.  The biggest problem is that there are too many women in this (I know that's opening up for ridicule as a gay man saying it, but it's true)-they feel frequently interchangeable and none of them stand out.  This film would be remade in 1983 in Connery's final Bond film (Never Say Never Again), and Domino would be played by future Oscar winner Kim Basinger, so I'm curious when I eventually get to that (not for this series, but in terms of Bond completionism) if it'll be better.

I do want to talk about the visual effects before we go, since this is a big Oscar blog, and I'd be remiss if I ignored them.  I think the effects are impressive-the opening sequence with Connery using a jet pack is crazy (it actually worked), and the underwater fights and the explosions later in the picture are top-notch.  I have to assume it was the underwater photography that got it the win though, given how revolutionary it looks.  I've seen a film like Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, which was a CinemaScope spectacle 12 years earlier starring Robert Wagner & Terry Moore, and it was considered revolutionary at the time (it even got nominated for Best Cinematography at the Oscars) in the way that it shot underwater so well in color, but 12 years later, Thunderball is on another level.  This looks like it was shot with green screens it's that impressive, and is a real step up compared to anything you'd see of this nature, likely inspiring everything in the future from Jaws to Titanic.

OVP: The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)

Film: The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)

Stars: Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Donald Crisp, Alan Hale, Sr., Vincent Price, Harry Stephenson, Nanette Fabray

Director: Michael Curtiz

Oscar History: 5 nominations (Best Art Direction, Cinematography, Visual Effects, Sound, Scoring)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Errol Flynn: click here to learn more about Mr. Flynn (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Errol Flynn lasted as a movie star for decades, but as one who was pretty much unimpeachable in terms of his box office, this period lasted roughly from 1935-1942, at which point he was oftentimes the biggest star on the Warner Brothers lot, give or take Bette Davis & James Cagney.  During this time, Flynn was married to the same woman, actress Lila Damita, but he had a history of womanizing.  Like Gary Cooper before him, he had an affair with Lupe Velez, and would get drunk off of William Randolph Hearst's vodka.  This reputation as a party boy was in stark juxtaposition to the men he'd play onscreen, frequently honorable scoundrels, or in the case of today's movie, a truly honorable man stuck in an impossible situation between two women.  This would also pair Flynn with both of the actresses that he'd be most associated with in his career: Olivia de Havilland, whom he would have a largely amicable relationship with, and Bette Davis...with whom he would not.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a glossy historical melodrama, one where facts should not get in the way of a good monologue.  Private Lives is about an aging Queen Elizabeth (Davis, in de facto kabuki makeup), who is clearly desperately in love with the handsome, popular Earl of Essex (Flynn), but cannot have him in the way that she wants because it would put at risk her power.  She instead constantly finds herself at odds with him, usually in open court, and has fights with him, using her lover as a pawn in a number of battles, oftentimes risking his life as punishment for not returning her love in the way that she wants, because he's also power-hungry.  This all happens while the beautiful Lady Penelope (de Havilland) is also pursuing the Earl, which in the film's final moments we're led to believe was nothing, and that Elizabeth was his own true love.  Of course, at that point Elizabeth has publicly demanded the Earl's head for trying to be her equal, and there is no way out for the Queen, doomed to forever remain unmarried & unloved (except by England).

This is territory we've been to cinematically-Elizabeth's inability to find love because she is not beautiful and demands power instead has been informed by everyone from Helen Mirren to Glenda Jackson to Cate Blanchett to Margot Robbie (even Bette would go to this well twice).  Davis, at the peak of her power and beauty, wears intense makeup that makes her look, well, hideous (and years older than she was), in some ways foreshadowing her later triumph in Baby Jane Hudson.  But the movie, despite looking divine (the costumes, art direction, & cinematography are all a triumph, though why it got a special effects nomination at the Oscars is beyond me...the Scoring nomination is a bit cheeky given there's a song sung by Olivia de Havilland's character written by the actual Walter Raleigh, here played by Vincent Price in an early role), is kind of a snore.  Davis overacts to the rafters (with diminishing returns), de Havilland is fun but too small of a part, and Flynn's performance is a bit underwhelming.  Flynn is so grand in swashbuckling roles, but (as we'll see in the coming weeks), he was a somewhat limited actor when it came to going beyond that ken.  He is breathtakingly beautiful in this-it takes an actress as confident as Davis to appear in this kind of makeup against Flynn, who looks like a Raphael painting in some scenes, and risk being thought ugly, but I don't think he can land some of the scenes, save for the last 15 minutes, when he's betrayed by Davis & they both seem to be in a much better movie.

Offscreen, Davis and Flynn were not close in the same way that he was with de Havilland, and it's hard to pinpoint the exact nature of their relationship given that Davis would outlive him by decades, and therefore be able to go on talk shows (and discuss in memoirs) what she thought of him, and regularly change her mind.  She seemed to not like his ethics as an actor (finding he preferred celebrity more than the serious craft that Davis believed screen-acting), and also thought it beneath her to share billing with him in the film (you'll note, watching it now, that Davis, not Flynn, gets top billing, which makes sense in retrospect given her legend, but at the time would've been a genuine debate as both were equally valuable to Warner Brothers).  Davis wanted Laurence Olivier, who wasn't famous enough to get a role like this in 1939 (Wuthering Heights had not come out when production was in motion), and at one point (according to Hollywood legend) actually slaps Flynn for real in one scene, rather than faking it as would be typical on a production, which caused Flynn to become ill.  Davis, though, had kinder words about Flynn than I do in this movie, conceding that she thought him very good years after the fact while watching the movie, and telling de Havilland "he can act!"

Who Will Make the Visual Effects Shortlist?

If you have followed along with me on the Oscar Viewing Project for many years (I promise, I am working my ass off to get another ballot up, but my European trip and having a cold for the entire week after have largely made me a vegetable the past week...prayers going up that I will have more time to work on my To Do list this week as it keeps getting longer), you will know that I am obsessed with the Visual Effects category.  Perhaps more than any other Oscar race, it's the one I think is the most intriguing, mostly because it is so dependent on the films in the race, and because it's the one race where you can predict the nominees relatively early.  People love to proclaim awards races "over" in October for acting races especially, and then they are insanely wrong at the end of the day (I don't understand the lack of first-hand embarrassment as a result of that, but to each their own in 2025, I guess...in a world where people use AI to send text messages, maybe no one is capable of shame anymore?), but Visual Effects films fit a certain type, and they are easier to see coming (any film that is going to be a contender for the nomination is, at this point, already advertising with movie trailers).  So I like to, each October, get down for posterity who I think will make the shortlist, the list of ten films that are contenders for the final five nominations.  Last year I did really well given how early it was, correctly getting all five of the eventual Oscar nominees on the list, plus three shortlisted contenders, with the only ones I missed being Civil War (which I didn't predict at all, and honestly don't feel too bad about) and Mufasa (which I nearly added to the list) in favor of the totally unloved Mad Max sequel Furiosa and the strange Robert Zemeckis family film Here.  I will say right up front that by doing this in October, I'm not going to get them all right, but it's more fun when we're still in the speculation phase and not just guessing the same things everyone else is guessing.  We'll talk through some of the nuances of this process, and how predicting the shortlist oftentimes differs from predicting the actual winners, but let's get into this, starting with the "sure things."

Sure Things

Saying "sure thing" about an Oscar nomination in October is usually tempting fate, but there are certain movies that you just can't ignore in a VFX race, and we have two of them this year.  This is less than I normally do, and you're going to hear this a few times in this article, but 2025 is a uniquely hard time to predict this mostly because there weren't as many major special effects films this year, and those that did get made aren't all hits.  You don't have to be a gigantic movie to be able to make the shortlist (last year, Civil War made the list with a $50 million budget, relatively low for this category), but it helps, and it also helps if you made a lot of money.  No movie this year did both to the degree I feel it's "inevitable" that they make this list.  So we're actually going to do something unprecedented with this article series-only pronounce two "not yet released" films for the shortlist.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is the sort of film that you can bet the farm on in this category.  Even if the film sucks (and James Cameron's near flawless record as a visual filmmaker makes that feel unlikely), it's still the undisputed frontrunner for both the nominations and a win.  You have to go back to 1984 to find a Cameron film that wasn't shortlisted (weirdly 1984's The Terminator), and so this is the free space in a Bingo card-it's in the Top 10.  

The other film that I think feels locked into the shortlist is Wicked: For Good.  I had mixed feelings on the first one, and in fact listed it fifth in my OVP for last year among the actual nominees.  But Oscar and I have different tastes, and given the gargantuan box office, the likely elevated effects here (for those familiar with the musical, you know the back half has more potential for special effects), and its previous nomination, I think it's certain to be nominated (and therefore shortlisted).  Other than those two, though, I don't think anyone can feel totally safe.

Will the Academy Like It?

One of the bigger questions when it comes to predicting VFX nominations is whether or not the rest of the Academy is going to be into the movies.  Best Picture contenders, even if they have only a few special effects, tend to get some love here.  Sinners, for example, if it's in the Best Picture field, could make this list.  One of the nuances of the Shortlist is that it frequently results in movies that have any sort of Best Picture heat getting on the list, even if they aren't nominated (recent Best Picture nominees Poor Things, Dunkirk, Black Panther, & The Shape of Water all got on the shortlists without getting actual nominations, for example).  

There are also films that come from major Oscar-winning/nominated directors that might be a contender if they click in other categories.  A few come to mind, including Kathryn Bigelow's political thriller A House of Dynamite, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, and Paul Greengrass's The Lost Bus.  Frankenstein's mixed reviews at film festivals, combined with being a horror movie (weirdly, despite the genre being a pioneer in visual effects for decades, horror movies don't always click with this branch) feels the most likely of the bunch even with those deficits, but I will note that The Lost Bus is coming from Industrial Light & Magic, the most important visual effects house in Hollywood (which gets a majority of the shortlisted contenders virtually every year. 

I also think that a big question mark is F1, which is a movie that might do very well in the tech categories (it's not going in for Best Picture, but Sound, Editing, Cinematography, & of course Visual Effects are all very real threats).  Despite most major blockbusters these days being sequels or remakes, this category does have a penchant for original movies, and so I honestly think that F1 is going to have a solid shot here, especially given the surprisingly robust box office pull.

Superheroes, Remakes, & Sequels

It's worth noting here that we are predicting the final shortlist nominees, not the Top 10 films that are most likely to get nominated, as there's a slight difference between the two, and a good example of that is Jurassic World: Rebirth.  The Jurassic Park franchise has not been nominated for this category since 1997, indicating that the Academy has largely given up on it as an option, but every installment in the series has been on the shortlist, which means that it's honestly a decent guess to be another also-ran.  I wouldn't have it in my Top 10 for getting a nomination (though it'd be close), but it is a really good guess for a shortlist citation.

That's the thing with the shortlist-it usually feels a bit more bloated, and definitely liking the "MOST" special effects contenders, so I wouldn't totally throw out things like the live-action remakes of Snow White, How to Train Your Dragon, and Lilo & Stitch.  I also think that the surprise recent nomination for Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning in this category makes the final installment in the series a probable shortlister, particularly given that four of the previous movies in the series were on the shortlist.  The Tron series has never been nominated, but given the impressive effects in Tron Ares' trailer (and that Tron Legacy got in the Top 10), I would also consider that a strong contender.

And then, of course, there are the superhero films.  Since the release of Iron Man, while there have been years the MCU has missed for a nomination, there has never been a year where one of their films wasn't on the ten-wide shortlist, and given there are three contenders this year (Captain America 4, Thunderbolts, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps) I think at least one is included, likely the latter given its retro charms, though two isn't out of the question.  Yes, two, don't give me that look even though the other two were noted misfires in terms of box office expectations.  Of the 34 MCU films prior to 2025 (i.e. the ones that have gone through their Oscar year) 13 got nominated, and another 12 were shortlisted, so they like Marvel a lot (they also have never given them a statue, so they don't love MCU a lot, but that's not what we're guessing today).

DC, on the other hand, regularly misses; they have only gotten one actual nomination in the past 15 years in this category (2022's The Batman), and in terms of the shortlist, the only other citation they've gotten in the past ten years was 2020's Birds of Prey (a notoriously weak field).  Superman checks a lot of boxes for Oscar (it's ILM, it's the rebrand of a franchise they've gone for before, and it made a lot of money), but it's not the sure thing that it would've been if, say, this was a Marvel movie.

Odds & Ends

Finishing things out, we have a few odds-and-ends.  If Glen Powell in The Running Man is a surprise hit, it's not insane to think it could make it onto the list.  Films like Sketch, Mickey 17, and Fountain of Youth are a bit too small to get into the conversation, but given they do a 20-wide field for this, it's not insane to think they might make the first round list (and if you make that list, you could always be the weird, "huh-how'd that happen"-style Civil War contender).  A likelier Civil War contender could be Warfare, which uses a combination of traditional and computer-generated effects in its production, and was critically-acclaimed earlier this year.  If there are fans in the Academy, it's not out of the question it could surprise.

But perhaps the most important "odds & ends" contender should be a movie that, as of right now, is the highest-grossing domestic movie of 2025 (though it's less than $1 million away from Lilo & Stitch, so that's a precarious perch): A Minecraft Movie.  Minecraft is jam-packed with special effects, and I honestly do think that it will make the twenty-wide list.  In a year of somewhat disappointing box office, it is absolutely a film that no one saw coming in terms of its success, and Oscar sometimes cares about what keeps his pockets lined.  The effects are pretty much agreed to be bad, and it will likely suffer the fate of a different Jack Black franchise (his Jumanji films have never been on the ten-wide shortlist despite multiple mentions on the 20-wide list), but to skip talking about it would be insane-it's definitely a part of the conversation for the shortlist, even if a nomination feels too silly to ponder.

My Final Shortlist Predictions (Alphabetical)

With all of that being said, here are my predictions as of right now of who will be the Visual Effects Shortlist in 2025:

• Avatar: Fire and Ash
• F1
• The Fantastic Four: The First Steps
• Jurassic World: Rebirth
• The Lost Bus
• Mission Impossible Final Reckoning
• Superman
• Thunderbolts
• Tron: Ares
• Wicked: For Good

I will confess that this feels a little bit vanilla.  I skipped Frankenstein because most people who have seen it seem to be skipping it (and I have been burned a lot by horror movies here, which is also why I'm swiping left on Sinners).  How to Train Your Dragon surely makes the most sense here, and probably should get the spot I gave to Thunderbolts, but the MCU is such a consistent bet for the shortlist, and honestly you have to have at least a couple listed that have no shot at an actual nomination as that's shortlist tradition.  Part of me wants to list Warfare and Minecraft, the former because it has such specific Civil War vibes (an early year critical darling that Oscar tries to make room for) and the latter because it made so much money, but I can't really justify skipping any of these, and if I did (looking at you Thunderbolts, The Lost Bus, and Jurassic World), I'd probably put in the flying dragons...even if they'll get their fair share of that in Avatar.  So these are my ten.

OVP: Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

Film: Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

Stars: JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Heather O'Rourke, Zelda Rubinstein, Will Sampson, Julian Beck

Director: Brian Gibson

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-00's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

If you look below, when you get past all of the Universal Monster pictures (which I've seen every single one of), we have not done any sequels in these write-ups.  That's on purpose.  While I have seen horror movie sequels (I am an ardent fan of the Scream movies at this point, for example, even taking off work to watch the sixth one so I didn't get it spoiled), I wanted this series to be about newness, and it felt a little cheap to just fill it up with franchises rather than lots of new ideas.  We are making the only exception to that this month with Poltergeist II, and we're doing this because the film was nominated for an Oscar, which has been an undercurrent of this year's theme of highlighting the rare horror films to be cited for Academy Awards.  The movie was nominated for Best Visual Effects, back when films like this could get cited for Best Visual Effects, though it (correctly) lost to Aliens.  The movie itself, though, never really justifies existing after the gemlike first picture in the series so surprisingly became American shorthand for 1980's horror.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place a year after the events of the first movie, and honestly part of it starts out promising.  We see the Freelings, including parents Diane (Williams) and Steve (Nelson) both dealing with the stress of the events, both practical (they can't get their insurance company to pay for their downed house) and psychological (they both are struggling with what to do next...basically PTSD abounds).  Psychic Tangina Barrons (Rubinstein) is back, now looking at their old home, and discovers that the spirit of an insane preacher named Henry Kane (Beck) is on the loose, and in this case, once again trying to get young Carol Anne (O'Rourke), pulling her to the Other Side.  A fight between the family, aided by Tangina and their new friend Taylor (Sampson), over whether or not Carol Anne will be brought to the Other Side once-and-for-all, or whether or not they can finally defeat it (until, of course, the third film in the series comes about).

I will not be seeing the third film, though.  Freed of the Oscar Viewing Project (the third film received no Academy Award nominations), I would only watch it if I'd liked the second one, and I decidedly did not.  The first movie, guided by producer Steven Spielberg, was an indictment of the Reagan Era, a spooky look at how consumerism and the pursuit of the white picket fence & life in the suburbs covers up the darker sides of the American Experiment, how it was built on the backs of other people's dreams.  It was littered with strong performances, and a wonderfully-tight script.

This film, on the other hand, is just a mess.  Gone is any sense of purpose-we get consumerism, but also fractured marital relations, an expanding (and nonsensical) mythology, and the same story we got in the first one with Carol Anne's soul being in the balance once again.  The movie wastes much of its cast.  Williams is front-and-center, but not given enough to do like in the first movie, and the distinctive Rubinstein just stays in the background for much of the movie, only being trotted out to read a line or two with high-pitched severity.  The visual effects, the main reason I watched this, aren't bad, but they also don't have the groundbreaking nature of the first film, and are more showy than actually aiding the film or making it pretty (or scary).

1920's: The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera

1930's: The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dracula's Daughter, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Invisible Man, Mad Love, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London

1940's: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Cat People, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Invisible Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Ghost, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, Phantom of the Opera, She-Wolf of London, Son of Dracula, The Uninvited, The Wolf Man

1950's: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, Revenge of the Creature

1960's: The Devil Rides Out, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead,Village of the Damned

1970's: The Amityville Horror, Black Christmas, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Don't Look Now, Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, Phantom of the Paradise, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man

1980's: Altered States, An American Werewolf in London, The Changeling, Child's Play, The Evil Dead, The Fly, The Fog, Friday the 13th, Gremlins, Hellraiser, The House on Sorority Row, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, Sleepaway Camp, The Thing

1990's-Present: Arachnophobia, The Blair Witch Project, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Candyman, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Paranormal Activity, Scary Movie, Scream

Who Will Make the Visual Effects Shortlist?

As we are closing out the blog at the beginning of next month, I am doing a bit of a final lap with some of my favorite recurring topics on this blog.  Saturday I did a look at the potential next American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and today we're going to look at the 2024 Visual Effects Oscar race, consistently one of my favorite Oscar categories.

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).

Sure Things

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.

Will the Academy Like It?

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.

Superheroes & Sequels

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).

Odds & Ends

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?

OVP: Visual Effects (1999)

OVP: Best Visual Effects (1999)

The Nominees Were...

John Gaeta, Janek Sirrs, Steve Courtley, & Jon Thum, The Matrix

John Knoll, Dennis Muren, Scott Squires, & Rob Coleman, Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace

John Dykstra, Jerome Chen, Henry F. Anderson III, & Eric Allard, Stuart Little

My Thoughts: In 1999, the Visual Effects category was still in its "influx" years where it generally got 3 nominations, and that was the case in 1999.  The category, for me, features not just one of the tougher competitions of 1999, but in the history of the category.  Two of these films do very different things with the concept of visual effects, but they also inspired a generation of young filmmakers, one big, one hip, and they'd both be hugely influential on the future of the movies (including their own franchises).

The Matrix cost half as much as the first of the George Lucas sequels (to be fair, it also earned half as much...both of these movies were mammoth hits), and it's not groundbreaking in the way that Phantom Menace is.  What it does do, though, is take its effects with a signature flare.  Borrowing from the John Woo action films, the movie's stunt coordination combined with a signature use of green for much of the actual CGI really works.  This became iconic for a variety of reasons, but mostly because they made each action sequence increasingly more intense and fantastic, a glowing crescendo until the final face-off.

The Matrix is more stylish, but it's hard not to marvel at the sheer magnitude of The Phantom Menace.  The movie, with over 2000 individual effects shots, is a wonder to behold.  Growing from Lucas' original trilogy, they give us high-intensity lightsaber duels, and actual cities spun from the background with the melding of matte painting and CGI coming together in a really impressive combination.  The film also features Jar Jar Binks, which while the most polarizing (and offensive) character in the Star Wars catalog, he also is a really spectacular example of CGI (Dobby, Gollum, and Caesar that followed would not be possible without Jar Jar).

Stuart Little also features a major character that is completely drawn from animation, and while the film itself is not in the same league visually as the other two, that should count for something.  Stuart's fur is the real calling card here.  A few years before Monsters Inc would break ground for VFX, this film was doing similar work on a similar caliber.  I don't love the way that they handle the non-title characters, particularly the way the cats are handled (their speaking patterns are a bit cartoonish), but I totally get what Oscar was attempting here.

Other Precursor Contenders: We are in the era before the Visual Effects Society, so our only precursor to look at is BAFTA, which was five-wide, but also had one 1998 title.  They gave the statue to The Matrix against The Mummy, Sleepy Hollow, The Phantom Menace, and A Bug's Life, which was eligible for Oscar the previous year.  The Oscar shortlist in 1999 was The Mummy, Sleepy Hollow, The World is Not Enough, and Wild Wild West, and given that it made it for Sound (and was the kind of blockbuster that normally made a list like this), I have to assume that The Mummy was the fourth place finisher.

Films I Would Have Nominated: It certainly would've made my list.  The use of sand in this film, with the mummy's face coming out of the the desert floor, is really something, combined with the growing evolution of the title character.  What could've been cheesy was in fact a really well-crafted picture.

Oscar’s Choice: Oscar will frequently go for the biggest and the gaudiest...but what he really wants is to be cool.  And in 1999, there was nothing cooler than The Matrix, which ended up taking this statue over Star Wars.

My Choice: No one has ever accused me of being cool, and when it comes down to it-I was more impressed by what Phantom Menace did than what The Matrix did, even if both of them will make my ballot at the end of this season.  I'll give it to George Lucas, therefore, over Neo (Stuart Little gets the bronze).

And those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Are you going to stand behind me with Darth Vader's origins or do you want to take the red pill with Keanu?  Do you ever marvel at races like this, that feel like they're preordained now but were actually quite competitive at the time?  And why do you think that The Mummy couldn't make the cut here (I'm pulling out the "horror bias" card myself)?  Share below!

Also in 1999: Makeup, Previously, in 1999

Past Best Visual Effects Contests: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023

OVP: Visual Effects (2023)

OVP: Best Visual Effects (2023)

The Nominees Were...

Jay Cooper, Ian Comley, Andrew Roberts, & Neil Corbould, The Creator

Takashi Yamazaki, Kiyoko Shibuya, Masaki Takahashi, & Tatuji Nojima, Godzilla Minus One

Stephane Ceretti, Alexis Wajsbrot, Guy Williams & Theo Bialek, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Alex Wuttke, Simone Coco, Jeff Sutherland, & Neil Corbould, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

Charley Henley, Luc-Ewen Martin-Fenouillet, Simone Coco, & Neil Corbould, Napoleon

My Thoughts: I am totally intrigued and fascinated by the direction that the Visual Effects category is headed in this decade.  Increasingly, the Visual Effects world has struggled with uglier blockbusters.  The Marvel and DCEU films in 2023 were rough, with movies like Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom looking atrocious.  And Oscar seems to have noticed.  But with less original franchise starters that have the kinds of budgets to compete with these pictures, they went with two films that actively flopped, a franchise that it took seven installments before they actually cared, and another franchise it took 70 years before they could get behind it.  All of this at the expense of subtler special effects in Best Picture nominees like Poor Things, Barbie, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Oppenheimer, showing that they're still the only tech category that doesn't just cite the Best Picture nominees.

The only movie that you'd normally expect to get nominated here was Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, the only nomination the entire MCU got in 2023 despite three high-profile releases.  I will totally own that while I didn't love this movie, and I did think that it wasn't extraordinary in its visual effects, it's easily the best the MCU has been since...Eternals?  The special effects on-display here are great during some of the Counter-Earth scenes, as we get giant crashes over this domestic city, and they are aided by stronger cinematography than we normally get in most blockbusters these days.  It's not enough by Oscar standards, but this is the one comic book movie that didn't embarrass itself last year, and it shows.

The Creator isn't a good movie, but its visual effects are gorgeous.  The lighting in this sometimes veers too dark, but that's one of the few complaints I have.  This is a decadent film in terms of its actual effects, frequently mixing both the big (lots of explosions) with the small.  There's something really compelling about the CGI in terms of the head movements of the actors playing robots that you actually believe their heads are hollow, a tricky feat in a film, particularly when they're being played by actual actors and not just CGI green screen suits.  I didn't like the political ramifications of the film (a movie about the merits of AI happening during a strike when the actors in the film were fighting against AI), but that's not the fault of the visual effects department (and given my pick doesn't have any real-world ramifications like it would in an actual Oscar ballot, won't impact my decision).

Godzilla Minus One gained a lot of headlines for having one of the smallest budgets for an Oscar-winner for Visual Effects in a decade (I believe since Ex Machina in 2015), but if you watched this, it doesn't show it.  No, the effects in this certainly aren't Avatar levels of groundbreaking, but they prove that great visual effects help the story and help the look of the film.  The CGI that is working through this has some grit because of the budget, but it uses that advantageously.  I was particularly impressed not just with the way that we see an increasingly menacing Godzilla (with no obvious cutaways because they couldn't afford a full body shot like, say, The Little Mermaid which cost 25x this movie but you never get a proper look at Ursula), but also the smaller effects like the water shots, which are breathtaking, and give us multiple worries (Godzilla is right there, but also...the ship sinking is going to kill everyone anyway if they can't keep it afloat).  A really special film, and one helped at every turn by this team.

Mission Impossible getting this nomination has to be one of the weirdest 11:00 numbers I've seen from Oscar in a while.  Yes, Godzilla had the longer streak it was breaking (this is the first time in 70 years that a Godzilla movie was nominated for an Oscar), but that was a prestige reimagining of the picture.  This was just Movie #7 in the series.  There are definitely scenes in this that really require visual effects wizardry, not just CGI but lots of stunt work (the opening scene on the motorcycle, the scene in the train where they're pouring out of the boxcar), but I have two things puzzling me.  The first is that there's a lot of repetition to previous movies (there's not a lot of newness here save for the two scenes I just listed), so I have to take away some points for just building on the previous films while not providing enough new.  The second is-why did it take so long?  My rule with the OVP is always judge just by what's in front of me that's new, but...this is not the best VFX in the series (Ghost Protocol and Fallout get VFX nominations for my My Ballot for a reason-they're the best in the series).  I can't fault the film for that (I will judge on its merits), but if Oscar was going to go here, why not do it sooner?

The final nomination is for Napoleon, which is the least showy of these five, and honestly got its nomination almost completely on the legs of the battle sequence at Austerlitz.  This is impressive, the way that it unfolds and, similar to the dual threats in Godzilla, is handled well from a narrative perspective in addition to the effects (the threat of both being shot and being drowned in the same passage).  But I'll be honest, much of the rest of the film is dull, particularly those scenes in Egypt where you never actually believe the actors are remotely near the Pyramids...it's just a mess of background CGI that would've done better with better location shooting.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Visual Effects Society gave their trophy to The Creator against Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and Oppenheimer, while its supporting effects winner was Nyad against John Wick: Chapter 4, Killers of the Flower Moon, Napoleon, and Society of the Snow.  It's worth noting that they have an Animated Feature category given Oscar's shortlist, and it was indeed won by Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse.  Poor Things won Best Visual Effects at the BAFTA's against The Creator, Guardians 3, Mission Impossible 7, and Napoleon.  The Oscar shortlist for this category was Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Poor Things, Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire, Society of the Snow, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.  The inclination is to fanboy out and think it was Spider-Verse in sixth or go with Poor Things because it was nominated elsewhere, but I'll be honest...given the need to award big budget films here (save Godzilla), I'm going to bet that it was Indiana Jones that just missed.

Films I Would Have Nominated: There's a specific film that's going to show up in my list that Oscar loved way more than me (this is the only time I would cite it but Oscar wouldn't), but I can't really complain about a movie with 13 nominations missing somewhere, so I'm going to instead say that the fun plays on size in Dungeons & Dragons were really smile-inducing (particularly the Bradley Cooper effect & Chris Pine's facial morphing), so I wish Oscar had gone there.

Oscar’s Choice: You have to go all the way back to 1998 to find what happened here-a Visual Effects field where anyone could win.  I predicted The Creator, which I'm guessing was second place, but you could make the argument for pretty much any order here, and Oscar surprisingly did the classy thing by giving it to the ingenuity of Godzilla Minus One.

My Choice: I'm going to repeat that.  I think the single best effect of the year is the heads in The Creator, which is my silver, but cohesively (and in terms of story-telling) I cannot deny Godzilla.  Behind them are Guardians, Mission Impossible, and then Napoleon.

And those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Is everyone ready to storm Tokyo with Godzilla, Oscar, & I, or did another film tickle your fancy?  How did Mission Impossible get this nomination on its seventh try?  And was it Poor Things, Indiana Jones, or another option lounging in sixth place?  Share below!

Also in 2023: Makeup & Hairstyling, Previously in 2023

Past Best Visual Effects Contests: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022