As Awards Season heats up, we get hints and clues in fits and spurts about which films might vie for the top prize on Oscar Night. Tonight we have another step towards Hollywood’s biggest night, with the announcement of the 20 films vying for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. Later this month, this list will be narrowed to a shortlist of 10, from which the final five nominees will be drawn. Speaking of drawing, here are the CGI wonders up for the prize!
Ant-Man and the Wasp
Aquaman
Avengers: Infinity War
Black Panther
Bumblebee
Christopher Robin
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
First Man
Incredibles 2
Isle of Dogs
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Mary Poppins Returns
Mission: Impossible – Fallout
Mortal Engines
The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
Paddington 2
A Quiet Place
Ready Player One
Solo: A Star Wars Story
Welcome to Marwen
Several of these films have yet to be released (Aquaman, Bumblebee, Mary Poppins Returns, Mortal Engines, and Welcome to Marwen). Of those, I’m only really interested in Welcome to Marwen based on the trailers. On the flipside, Mortal Engines looks fake and cheesy as shit. Of the rest of the movies on this list, I haven’t seen Paddington 2, which is one of the few regrets so far this year, as it maintains a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is pretty spectacular considering it debuted during the January studio dump. I also haven’t seen Nutcracker, nor do I plan to unless it’s nominated, same goes for Bumblebee when it comes out.
From a personal standpoint, I’d eliminate Black Panther because of the fake looking armored rhinos (though the other stuff was pretty cool), Fantastic Beasts for having almost no wonder whatsoever apart from the Chinese lion/dragon creature, Incredibles 2, because unlike Isle of Dogs there are no distinctive visual effects to combine with the main animation (this feature also got Kubo and the Two Strings nominated in this category two years ago), Jurassic World because it sucks copious balls and looked fake as shit, and Solo for the worm boss lady in the beginning who didn’t matter and the space hentai monster.
Based on these factors alone, I could personally knock this list down to 10 pretty easily. We’ll see what the VFX wing of the Academy does later this month.
Join the conversation in the comments below! What category are you looking forward to? Who here gets your vote? How many shots from the Transformers franchise will get recycled for the prequel while still letting it be eligible? Let me know!
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