The Visual Effects Race Heats Up

It’s getting close to the time of year when the executive committee of the Academy’s visual effects branch selects the 10 shortlisted films that will continue in the VFX category race, and among the anticipated contenders, the branch also has some unexpected choices to consider.

While the presumed frontrunner, James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water, won’t be released until Dec. 16, the sequel to the director’s 2009 fantasy film seems a fait accompli for the shortlist. The work was led by Weta FX and four-time Oscar-winning senior VFX supervisor Joe Letteri (who with Weta also led the work on the original Avatar, which won the VFX Oscar). The Way of Water involves new techniques, including those used in performance capture.

Also expected are multiple contenders from the long list of this year’s effects-laden Marvel and DC movies, which include Marvel’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder, as well as DC’s Black Adam and The Batman. (Individuals in this mix include Black Adam‘s production VFX supervisor, Bill Westenhofer, who previously won Oscars for Life of Pi and The Golden Compass.)

In five of the past six years, at least one Marvel movie has been nominated in the category. (The exception was the 2020 season, when, due to the pandemic, the studio didn’t have a theatrical release.) The catch: Despite the popularity and scale of these movies, the last time a comic-book-based feature claimed a VFX Oscar was 18 years ago, for 2004’s Spider-Man 2 — long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe dominated the box office.

There’s a range of additional contenders. Among them are the high-flying VFX in Top Gun: Maverick, the dinosaurs of Jurassic World: Dominion, Harry Potter franchise film Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, the clever Everything Everywhere All at Once and Jordan Peele’s sci-fi movie Nope (whose production VFX supervisor is another multi-Oscar-winning contender: Guillaume Rocheron, who previously won Academy Awards for 1917 and Life of Pi). Not-yet-released titles include Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation, led by three-time VFX Oscar winner Robert Legato (Titanic, Hugo, The Jungle Book).

Amazon documentary Good Night Oppy has a shot at a potentially notable placement on the shortlist. Industrial Light & Magic created 34 minutes of fully CG shots for the doc, which follows a pair of exploration rovers as they travel to and around Mars, including their landing and mission work on the surface of the Red Planet. Should it make the shortlist, Good Night Oppy would be only the second documentary to achieve this feat. Welcome to Chechnya — with its inventive use of face-swapping techniques to give participants a “digital disguise” — became the first documentary to make the VFX shortlist, in 2021, though it didn’t make the final five.

There’s also potential to have one or more animated movies on the shortlist.

On rare occasions, animated features have been nominated for the VFX Oscar, including a pair of stop-motion movies: 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and 2016’s Kubo and the Two Strings.

Depending on what you consider an animated movie, Jon Favreau’s 2019 The Lion King also was nominated in the category.

The previous nominations of stop-motion movies could signal an opportunity for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio and Wendell & Wild, the latter from director Henry Selick, who helmed the aforementioned Nightmare Before Christmas. On occasion, CG animated movies such as Pixar’s Ratatouille have also found themselves in the race.

The Oscar shortlists will be announced Dec. 21 for VFX, as well as documentary feature, international feature, makeup and hairstyling, score, song and sound, and animated, documentary and live-action shorts.

This story first appeared in the Nov. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.