It's all coming to a head. The 96th Academy Awards at Hollywood's Dolby Theatre are less than 24 hours away, and Oscar winner predictions are gathering greater momentum. Oscars 2024 will, of course, honour and award the best movies, acting and technical cinematic prowess seen in 2023. A particularly interesting Oscars shortlist this year is for the Visual Effects Oscar. Some critics say that the fact that the five shortlisted films have no overlap with the Best Picture category (not even Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer with its now-famous recreation of the Trinity blast), means it could be any film's Oscar!
Having said that, there some clear favourites for a few reasons. There's Godzilla: Minus One, for instance. Here, the fact that the director of the film, Takashi Yamazaki, was also the VFX supervisor and one of the visual effects artists, helped the small team cut down decision time and increase the number of iterations they could do. This is the 37th Godzilla film ever, and Godzilla's spines/plates glow icy blue here - a throwback to the Heisei era (1984–1995) Godzilla films and the 2014 Godzilla (incidentally, directed by Gareth Edwards whose The Creator is also nominated in this category).
Watch the video below on how the team created visuals of multiple ships using one basic set comprising just a small section of a ship - in the absence of hydraulic cylinders to capture the motion of the ships on water, the team used cranes to move the cameras up and down, and asked the actors to rock back and forth as if navigating choppy seas. The results are surprisingly convincing.
Four of the entries - Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Napoleon and The Creator - were all nominated for a BAFTA VFX award, too. They lost to director Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things - which is nominated in 11 Oscars categories, though VFX is not among them.
Oscar for Outstanding Visual Effects - a short history
The Oscar for Outstanding Visual Effects pays tribute to the remarkable progress in both technology and creativity in the film industry. Esteemed since the inception of cinema, this prestigious accolade has continuously celebrated excellence in visual effects, spanning from the pioneering aerial combat scenes in Wings in 1929, when the Academy Award was given for ‘Best Engineering Effects’, to the more recent one last year in 2023, for Best Visual Effects that was given to Joe Letteri, Richard Baneham, Eric Saindon and Daniel Barrett for Avatar: The Way of Water.
Past winners in this category also include The War of the Worlds (1953), Ben-Hur (1959), Mary Poppins (1964), Superman (1978), ET The Extraterrestrial (1982), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Forrest Gump (1994), Titanic (1997), The Matrix (1999), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03), King Kong (2005), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), Avatar (2009), Inception (2010) and Dune (2021).
Clearly, great VFX has lifted some of the most awe-inspiring, wondrous films of our times.
2024 Oscar for Outstanding Visual Effects shortlist
In the last decade or so, the progress in visual effects has been remarkable, with technological mastery at its peak along with immense creativity. And with the introduction of computer-generated imagery (CGI) a new era of potential has come in that enables filmmakers to craft breathtaking, lifelike visuals that were previously deemed unattainable.
This year’s nominees for the Visual Effects category are:
1. Jay Cooper, Ian Comley, Andrew Roberts and Neil Corbould for The Creator
Directed by Gareth Edwards, The Creator is a sci-fi film about a war between humans and artificial intelligence. Set in 2070, the visual effects include the creation of a military space station called NOMAD.
2. Takashi Yamazaki, Kiyoko Shibuya, Masaki Takahashi and Tatsuji Nojima for Godzilla: Minus One
The latest film in the Godzilla franchise has director Takashi Yamazaki doubling as visual effects artists along with Kiyoko Shibuya, Masaki Takahashi and Tatsuji Nojima.
3. Stephane Ceretti, Alexis Wajsbrot, Guy Williams and Theo Bialek for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
4. Alex Wuttke, Simone Coco, Jeff Sutherland and Neil Corbould for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
5. Charley Henley, Luc-Ewen Martin-Fenouillet, Simone Coco and Neil Corbould for Napoleon.
The other couple of films that should have made it to the nominees list for best visual effects include Elemental (Sanjay Bakshi, Stephen Marshall, Jon Reisch, Junyi Ling) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Michael Lasker, Alan Hawkins, Bret St. Clair, Pav Grochola).
Interestingly, while The Creator dominated Visual Effects Society (VES) Award 2024 with five wins and Spider-Verse with four, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1, Godzilla Minus One and Napoleon were not a part of the VES Awards 2024.
However, Napoleon has three Oscar nominations this year - for visual effects, costume design and production design. The Creator and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One have two nominations each for visual effects and sound. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has one nomination for visual effects, while Godzilla: Minus One is the first Godzilla movie to ever get an Oscar nomination.
96th Oscars VFX longlist: The films that didn't make the shortlist
Executive committee members of the Visual Effects Branch of the Academy shortlisted the films in this category, narrowing the list down from 10 to five in January this year. The members shortlisted the films to be considered for a VFX Oscar this year, based on watching excerpts from the films and interviews with the artists.
The 10 films in the longlist were:
1. The Creator
2. Godzilla Minus One
3. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
4. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
5. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
6. Napoleon
7. Poor Things
8. Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire
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