Oscar Blitz 2026 – Visual Effects

Well, last night certainly was interesting. On Sunday evening, the Screen Actors Guild handed out their awards. It was the third of the major union awards ceremonies, and it definitely threw a wrench into the Academy gears. While there was much to cheer and weep for (Catherine O’Hara getting TWO posthumous awards for her work on The Studio on the TV side of things), the real news of the night was the creation of some late breaking uncertainty for the Oscars, now less than two weeks away.

The first eyebrow raises came with the Supporting categories. Sean Penn took Supporting Actor, his second win in a row after the BAFTAs, solidifying a dead heat race between himself, Stellan Skarsgård (who won the Golden Globe), and Jacob Elordi (Critics’ Choice). For Supporting Actress, the win went to Amy Madigan, her second victory this Awards Season, giving her perhaps a slight edge over Teyana Taylor (Globe) and Wunmi Mosaku (BAFTA). It’s a rarity when we get to say this, but both Supporting races are now too close to call.

Then the real drama happened. In the first major upset of the campaign, Michael B. Jordan took Best Actor over Timothée Chalamet, who to this point had an effectively undefeated winning streak (the BAFTA went to Robert Aramayo for I Swear, which isn’t eligible for this year’s Oscars because it won’t been released stateside until April). After that, Sinners took the Best Ensemble prize, the SAG equivalent of Best Picture, over One Battle After Another.

These late results are crucial for two key reasons. The first is that the Acting Branch of the Academy is by far the largest of the entire organization, and pretty much every member in good standing is also in SAG (though not the other way around, obviously, rhombuses and squares and all that). It’s not a 1:1 correlation between SAG results and the Oscars, but more often than not, they do align. The second is that the voting deadline for the Oscars is this Thursday, March 5. Any voters looking for some last-minute inspiration could easily be convinced that Sinners – and Jordan by extension – is the way to go. This is the last time the two front-runner films will face off head-to-head before Oscar Night (the Writers Guild has their say this coming Sunday, but Sinners is up for Original Screenplay while One Battle After Another is nominated for Adapted Screenplay, so they won’t directly compete), and the two candidates presumed to have the most momentum heading in just took major losses.

Does this mean that Chalamet will be denied again? Perhaps not. It definitely creates a discussion and some drama, though. The same goes for One Battle. I think we can assume that Paul Thomas Anderson has Adapted Screenplay and Best Director locked up, and the film did also take the Producers Guild Award, so it probably still has the advantage. But given that Best Picture is a ranked choice vote rather than a plurality, maybe winning Best Ensemble convinces a few voters to elevate Sinners into first place on their ballot, or even just further up so that it’s not eliminated after the first or second rounds of tallying. If nothing else, I think we can pencil Sinners in for the inaugural Casting award, as it now has SAG’s endorsement as well as Critics’ Choice (the only other body that has a Casting category, the BAFTAs, gave it to I Swear).

Why am I bringing all this up now? Well, I wanted there to be some intrigue for your reading pleasure, because for tonight’s category, there is none. Even as the storytelling gets worse in the Avatar series, the selling point will always be the visuals, which continue to dazzle, to the point that we might as well not even bother with the contest. Two of the remaining four contenders don’t even have the beginnings of a case, and were clearly just picked at random from the shortlist to pad things out. Even the last Avatar drubbing at least gave the appearance of a contest, with the likes of The Batman, Top Gun: Maverick, and Wakanda Forever offering something legitimate. Not so much this time. Apart from the obvious winner, we have the belle of this year’s ball, which has a much subtler profile in this particular field, and the bollocks tech-based “action” movie that needs this nomination to save face so that its Best Picture nod isn’t seen as a complete joke (even though it most assuredly is). I can’t wait until these people start nominating generative AI for this award.

This year’s nominees for Visual Effects are…

Avatar: Fire and Ash – Joe Letteri, Richard Baneham, Eric Saindon, and Daniel Barrett

The weird thing is, if there was ever a chance to topple James Cameron’s Dances with Smurfs from its pedestal in this field, this was probably the year to give it the old college try. Because the thing is, while the effects look spectacular in Fire and Ash, as they have in the previous two films, with an emphasis on eye-catching motion capture, this is, to date, the Avatar installment with the least amount of world-building and new ideas.

The first movie established the environments of Pandora, gave us incredible scenery, cool creatures, and the incredibly lifelike (for the time) Na’vi people. The Way of Water upped the ante by introducing the water tribe, who have an entirely different anatomical design than the forest folk, gave us even more gorgeous animals, and kept things challenging by having the cast swimming in their mo-cap suits to create a believable effect when it came to water physics.

This movie, however? There’s nothing all that novel. The fire clan and the wind traders have the same body types as the forest people, just with different “outfits.” We don’t spend all that much time in the burnt out lands at the base of the volcano where the Mangkwan live, so the area doesn’t have the same identity as the previous two environments. It also doesn’t help that, because it’s been consumed by fire, most of what we see is just gray barrenness. Quaritch looks even less convincing as a Na’vi than he did last time, and bringing back Spellman and Selfridge just reinforces how lame they (and their surrounding holograms) looked in the first movie. The bloody space whales are given more character development than the Sully family, and we’ve already gotten used to seeing them. There’s no new flora or fauna to speak of, but hey, here’s more of those idiotic crab walker machines that punch their own fists.

Yes, these effects are still miles ahead of the competition, but that’s largely by default. The fact that Cameron and his team basically rested on their design laurels presented an opportunity that the voters didn’t dare take up, conceding the contest before it even began.

F1 – Ryan Tudhope, Nicolas Chevallier, Robert Harrington, and Keith Dawson

The effects in F1 are, at best, a mixed bag. There are some truly awe-inspiring sequences, particularly the pivotal crash that injures Joshua Pearce midway through. Seriously, go watch the behind-the-scenes video on just that scene alone. The combination of practical and digital effects is amazing, including the pneumatic catapult they built to launch the fucking car. That’s the kind of movie magic that used to dominate the industry. It made us feel something because it was really there.

But then you get bullshit like the Daytona sequence at the beginning, which all but negates whatever points the flick would get for the better stuff. I mean, you have fireworks going off during a race, something that literally never happens because it’s a fire hazard, an announcer tells you that the crowds have gone home for the night (it’s a 24-hour race), so the display is basically for an audience of no one, making it superfluous nonsense, and the whole thing is capped off with a fake-as-hell looking shot where a helicopter hovers like, five feet above the track just to shoehorn in an NBC logo. No chopper would fly that low on a racetrack, especially during an active race. You’re just begging for an “OH THE HUMANITY!” moment.

The fun of racing movies is the excitement of the actual race. We want to feel like we’re in the driver’s seat, or at least some approximation of it. That requires logic and discipline in your effects. Scenes like Daytona, as well as the litany of shots where Brad Pitt literally breaks every rule in the book at the risk of everyone’s lives, look cheap because there’s no logic involved in the decisions. When you can’t suspend your disbelief, it all just looks like a shitty cartoon.

Jurassic World Rebirth – David Vickery, Stephen Aplin, Charmaine Chan, and Neil Corbould

I have a genuine question to ask you all. Which effect in Rebirth was the most embarrassing and insulting to the memory of Stan Winston, the savant who oversaw the mix of animatronics and CGI in the original Jurassic Park 33 years ago? Seriously, think on it for a moment. I’ll wait.

So what was it? Was it the Spineosaurs climbing onto the boat that looked less like the antagonist from Jurassic Park III and more like Crocomire from Super Metroid? Was it the death of cannon fodder extra #2 where she just walked behind a giant bundle of stuff and a fin came up from behind to snatch her out of existence. Was it the raptors getting jumped by the Pteranodons while Xavier was taking a piss? Was it the T-Rex not making a sound and disappearing from behind a raft? Was it said T-Rex being able to submerge itself and swim in a river that a mere 10 seconds previous was shallow enough for the humans to wade in at waist level? Was it the magical Brachiosaur hybrids that are 20 stories high, but somehow could stay hidden in tall grass, with their 100-foot long string tails? Was it the straight up ripoff of the kitchen scene, only with CGI abominations in a convenience store for added product placement? Was it the French guy getting swallowed whole by a Pteranodon without a single sound, not even a scream, as he’s guzzled like a pelican eating a fish?

Or maybe, just maybe, was it the D-Rex? Not only is it woefully non-threatening, not only does it look like the Rancor with Down Syndrome, not only is it ugly as sin, but it basically plays NO part in the film! It shows up for the mind-bogglingly stupid opening scene where a fucking SNICKERS WRAPPER dooms an entire laboratory, where’s it’s largely only shown in red-tinted smoky silhouette, and then it’s there for the finale where it turns Rupert Friend into a Gamorrean Guard snack, chases Mahershala Ali’s flare, roars at him, somehow DOESN’T EAT HIM, and then fucks off! That’s what you were building up? That was your world-ending threat? How lame can you get?

Stay tuned for that answer in Jurassic World Birth Control, presumably coming in 2028.

The Lost Bus – Charlie Noble, David Zaretti, Russell Bowen, and Brandon K. McLaughlin

The entirety of this nomination can be summarized by queueing up the Ohio Players on your Spotify.

FIIIIIIIIRE!
Uh, ooh,
FIIIIIIIIRE!

…and so on.

Literally, all the visual effects in The Lost Bus concern the rapidly encroaching and dangerous Camp Fire, which went on to kill over 80 people and cost billions in damages. So, you know, prime territory to make a quick buck on Apple, right? Not in poor taste at all!

Anyway, the fire effects are mostly convincing, if unimpressive. The sky turns red, flickers of ash float by the screen, and occasionally we turn the camera towards a full-on inferno. As fighter planes descend on the area in an attempt to douse the flames, the aircrafts themselves look fairly realistic, and the flow of water and red suppressant materials faithfully replicate what you’d see on the news.

All that said, the most intriguing effect comes very early in the film, when the fire actually starts. The blaze was triggered by faulty electrical equipment that hadn’t been maintained properly. Worn harnesses snapped, causing wires to go down and spark the fire with leaves, grass, and other various kindling material on the ground, and the fire spread incredibly fast due to high winds. The film depicts this about as perfectly as you could hope. We see the cables hit the ground. We see a couple bits of bark and leaf ignite. We see wind blow the nascent flames onto the next piece of dry flora. Then another, and another. Before you know it, the forest is completely immolated. That’s how wildfires genuinely start in California, and why they’re so difficult to fight. The smallest metaphorical match can set off the powder keg that are our forests, especially in more remote, mountainous areas that don’t have the best roads and infrastructure. There’s a reason why the phrase is “spreads like wildfire,” because it’s so quick and uncontrollable that a few random or careless seconds can spell disaster for millions. There’s a lot I don’t like about The Lost Bus, but I’ll concede that at least in this one respect, they fucking nailed it.

Sinners – Michael Ralla, Espen Nordahl, Guido Wolter, and Donnie Dean

If you asked me which nomination for Sinners I’d nix, it’d probably be this one. At least, it would be, if I didn’t see what else made the shortlist, because apart from Avatar, this beats the lot by a country mile. The reason I would be okay losing this one is because, while the VFX in the film can be impressive, they’re far subtler than the rest of the pack.

Now, you may be saying, “Wait, what about the twins?” which is perfectly valid. Well, in a sneak peak of this Friday’s video for Film Editing, the act of combining Smoke and Stack into their scenes, and thus having Michael B. Jordan in two places at once, is more an editing trick than what most would consider visual effects. Yes, it involves a bit of digital artistry, but really, it’s just layering two shots together, for the most part. There are complicated scenes where you definitely need the VFX team’s expertise to make their interactions appear seamless, but when it’s just the two of them talking in the same frame, that’s more the edit team placing two shots that were filmed from the same angle over each other, stacking Stack as it were. Even when they directly touch one another, embracing or exchanging objects, that’s mostly a simple key effect where a stand-in was used. It’s not that the effects group had no involvement, it’s just not as involved as you might think.

Where they did come into play are in two major aspects, one much more obvious than the other. The more forward-facing involves the flames and various pyrotechnics associated with the “I Lied to You” sequence, where the juke metaphorically burns down, in the morning when the vampires burn alive in the sunrise, and in the wish fulfillment finale where Smoke lays waste to all the Klan fools with guns and explosives. It’s all done quite well, but it’s very run-of-the-mill, all things considered.

What’s not so plain is in how the VFX team identifies the vampires. Throughout the film, when Remmick and his ever-growing army are poised to strike, their eyes light up with a demonic glow. That’s where the effects department shines. It’s a very small touch, but it’s maintained consistently throughout, and it adds to the otherworldly horror of the moment. When you see that literal spark in their eyes, you know it’s already too late, and they’re about to make a meal out of you. It makes the vampires into feral beasts, using their music to howl at the moon lighting up their faces. In a story about how vampirism is used as an analog to assimilation and cultural/racial appropriation, it’s that eerie light in everyone’s eyes that shows that, per Remmick’s twisted agenda, they all have become equal, part of the same hive mind. The lack of a dark pupil ends up being the only thing that truly separates the living from the undead. It’s a slight touch, but it’s brilliant.

***

So yeah, this was an exercise in futility. Avatar is going to win, basically because there was no honest competition. It’s not that there couldn’t have been a real contest, it’s just that the Academy decided not to have one. When I’m reaching this hard for something to talk about, including from the most nominated film in Oscars history, you know it’s a lost cause. The weird thing is, though, there were viable candidates. Off the top of my head, Mickey 17, Warfare, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Superman, Fantastic Four: First Steps, and The Running Man all could have given us some genuine discourse in this category, as each provided an excellent blend of practical and digital effects that enhanced their various stories, AND the movies were actually good enough to warrant consideration, instead of garbage like Jurassic Grift 7. Of this group, only Superman was even shortlisted, but somehow The Electric State and Tron: Ares were as well. Clearly the voters just didn’t care this time.

My Rankings:
1) Avatar: Fire and Ash
2) Sinners
3) F1
4) The Lost Bus
5) Jurassic World Rebirth

Who do you think should win? Vote now in the poll below!

Up next, we go from the most foregone of foregone conclusions at this year’s ceremony to a category that is completely up in the air, just like it is almost every year, because most people don’t watch non-features. It’s Animated Short!

Join the conversation in the comments below! Can anyone take down the Na’vi? Was there even a point to having the category this year if the Academy was just going to fill it with terrible films? Would Mrs. Frizzle have gotten the kids to safety faster than Matthew McConaughey? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!