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Weirdly, Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects went hand-in-hand for five years in a row (“Avatar,” “Inception,” “Hugo,” “Life of Pi,” Gravity”) until last year snapped that streak. But with “The Revenant” seeming stronger and stronger, I actually moved it to first place in my Visual Effects predictions too.
The Visual Effects Oscar doesn’t usually seem to be about which film has the best effects. It tends to be Movie We Like The Most That Has Effects In It. That’s why films like “Forrest Gump,” “Gladiator” and “Hugo” win — because they’re Best Picture nominees that have some effects in them.
This year uncharacteristically has three Best Picture nominees up for Visual Effects (also “The Martian” and “Mad Max”), but “The Revenant” is almost definitely the one the academy likes the most as a whole. Plus that weird Cinematography connection; “Revenant” is a shoo-in for that award.
Is anyone else predicting “The Revenant” for Visual Effects?
ReplyIt’s a clever pick, but ‘The Revenant’ doesn’t quite fit into the ‘Life of Pi’/’Avatar’/’Gravity’ group because its effects are localized (mostly) to a few scenes.
It would be like if ‘The Impossible’ won visual effects for the tsunami scene. When you think of ‘The Revenant’, you think of the bear and…?
Here is an important stat:
BAFTA and the Academy have agreed on nine of the last ten winners for visual effects (BAFTA went for ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows – Part 2’ over ‘Hugo’). Tom’s theory about voters thinking of the *most* of whatever they’re judging holds true here. ‘Star Wars’ undoubtedly has the most visual effects, which is why it won BAFTA, and is probably on the path to an Oscar.
ReplyCopy URL“Movie We Like The Most That Has Effects In It” is also part of why I predicted Interstellar last year over Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which won the Visual Effects Society and Critics’ Choice Awards. Having said that, The Revenant is “definitely” in third place for this category. Also, I would not have predicted Birdman for Best Visual Effects last year if it had been nominated, even though it won the same Supporting guild award as The Revenant and Hugo.
ReplyCopy URLTom’s theory about voters thinking of the *most* of whatever they’re judging holds true here. ‘Star Wars’ undoubtedly has the most visual effects, which is why it won BAFTA, and is probably on the path to an Oscar.
What gets me is whether they are voting for “most” or “most memorable”. Because there were a lot of spaceships and stars, but I have seen those before. The storm sequence or the spiked cars constantly in motion and exploding on orange sand against a blue sky? That seemed fresh.
ReplyCopy URLThe reason they have aligned is because in the age of movies being filmed with CGI, both “Visual Effects” and Cimenatography” now just mean “Best looking movie” according to the academy. This year there isn’t a movie like that. Mad Max and The Revenant were mostly filmed the old-fashioned way, so the awards may be split.
ReplyCopy URLThe reason they have aligned is because in the age of movies being filmed with CGI, both “Visual Effects” and Cimenatography” now just mean “Best looking movie” according to the academy. This year there isn’t a movie like that. Mad Max and The Revenant were mostly filmed the old-fashioned way, so the awards may be split.
Yeah, this is a perfect summary.
How do we fix this? We have two categories for writing because AMPAS thinks that comparing an original work and an adapted work is not quite fair. Yet, is it fair to compare extensive green-screen (‘Life of Pi’) to films which don’t use many special effects (‘Anna Karenina’)? Why don’t we split cinematography into “effects-driven” (‘Gravity’, ‘Avatar’) and “traditional” (‘The Hateful Eight’, ‘Carol’)? Surely that is more justified than having two sound categories which have ~80% overlap in nominees.
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