by Nathaniel R
Oppenheimer
The Oscar race that looks the most perplexing from this distance and could get worse with strike related delays is surely Best Visual Effects. Dune Part Two, before its departure from the calendar year, was an easy lock for a nomination and threat for a repeat win. Oscar voters are hardly purists or elitists in this category, since some truly questionable nominations have occured over the years. But still, every presumable contender remaining (whether already released or planning to arrive in time) has significant obstacles to success...
BEST 'SUPPORTING' VISUAL EFFECTS
Oppenheimer and Barbie and presumably other prestige titles to come have the real problem of "supporting" visual effects. It's not that this should be a real problem, don't misunderstand, but that it is. The problem is that this branch loves visual effects to be the raison d'être of the movie. But given the lack of big and respectable visual effects spectacles, Oppenheimer is probably the surest future nominee.
Barbie
PURPOSEFULLY SILLY FX
Oscar voters rarely do "silly" so even when visual effects are meant to be hokey. Barbie's group travel sequences or Asteroid City's alien visitation, as hilarious as they are, are probably not going to be taken seriously. Will this be a problem for the often comic Dungeons & Dragons which is visual fx heavy? It could be.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
AGING FRANCHISES
Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1 has the problem of every Mission Impossible movie before it being ignored by the Oscars. Voters only very rarely honor a franchise late in its run if it they haven't already loved the franchise at one point (X-Men Days of Future Past is a rare exception that proves the rule). Even when voters previously loved a franchise, once they tune out, they don't usually come back; Visual Effects, and to some extent the Sound categories are where we often see this Emmy-like dynamic play out. So this is a real problem for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The first two Indiana Jones films won this category but the third and fourth weren't nominated.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3
COMIC BOOK MOVIES
Superhero movies have a spotty record in this category, believe it or not. A good percentage of Marvel titles and most DC titles fail to score which means that it's not an easy call to predict, say, The Marvels, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, Ant Man and the Wasp Quantumania, Flash, Shazam Fury of the Gods, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Blue Beetle or any other superhero movie that we're forgetting from 2023. Of those sequels listed only the Guardians franchise has scored a nomination in this category before.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
ANIMATED FILMS
Could the dearth of strong live action contenders mean something great looking and animated like Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse or Pixar's Elemental or Netflix's Nimona are actually considered? It's sad to remember that only three animated film have ever scored in this category: The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Kubo and the Two Strings (2016), and The Lion King (2019). The two earliest to receive the Visual Effects nomination were stop motion films which is as close as animation gets to live action filmmaking and the most recent animated nominee kept calling itself a 'live action reimagining' as if it wasn't entirely animated.
65
LOWER BUDGETS / PROFILES
This category prefers films with mega budgets even if the effects in scrappier titles are superior. A rare example of a low budget film winning the category was Ex Machina (2014) and what a deserved win! So there's little hope that voters might spring for something 'small' even if it looks great like, say, 65. Another example of this might be the vampire picture the Last Voyage of the Demeter which, for whatever one might say about the picture as a whole, is thinking about ways to deliver cool images without a pricey vfx budget.
The Little Mermaid
UNDER THE SEA
We don't want to believe they'll go for The Little Mermaid -- especially not after Avatar Way of Water showed us how rich underwater effects could look -- but we begrudgingly admit it's possible. After all, in the same year that the Avatar sequel won, Black Panther Wakanda Forever's also took place largely underwater and the comparison wasn't exactly flattering to the Marvel film.
Thoughts? What films do you think might score here in this strange year?