Actually several of us have, I think we all agreed that it pretty much sucked.MaxWilder wrote: I’ll never concede that The Midnight Sky is a real movie. (George Clooney directed and starred in a film and not one person has commented on it.)
Categories One-by-One: Visual Effects
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Big Magilla
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Re: Categories One-by-One: Visual Effects
Re: Categories One-by-One: Visual Effects
I was fine with their voting for Not The Lion King. But why couldn’t it have been Avengers: Endgame? Thanos might be the best CG villain ever, and isn’t one Oscar a proper thank-you for the billions and billions that the franchise brought in?Mister Tee wrote:Enough people were sick of Disney's cash-in live action remakes that The Lion King fell to 1917 last year
As for this year...it’s gotta be Tenet, right? Love and Monsters is a B-movie. I don’t know what The One and Only Ivan is. Mulan was instantly forgotten and I’ll never concede that The Midnight Sky is a real movie. (George Clooney directed and starred in a film and not one person has commented on it.)
Re: Categories One-by-One: Visual Effects
The biggest thing working against Tenet is how much of the film is done without visual effects. It's a bragging point for the filmmaking team. I think it benefits from the fact that the whole film just looks like a visual effect, and considering how much is done in camera why should that be a detriment? It also only has one additional nomination, the same as Mulan.
Over the last twenty years, this has been a very predictable category, going to more or less the expected nominee with two exceptions: The Golden Compass and Ex Machina.
Ex Machina is the upset that jumps to everyone's mind. However, I think Ex Machina's win obscures the fact that 2015 was a very odd year for the category. The contenders were Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, The Revenant, Star Wars: The Force Awakens... and little Ex Machina, which probably benefited from having a unique take on VFX with a small budget amidst four fairly bloated efforts. So, in this race, what's the Ex Machina? Well, there's more than one small VFX film so I'm not sure that comparison works. Is it Love & Monsters? Is it The One and Only Ivan?
The Golden Compass was a big failed franchise, a box office disaster, with admittedly incredible effects in comparison to Transformers which was a massive franchise launch but with effects that were largely incoherent. The big difference is that nobody seems to think that Mulan or The Midnight Sky has strong VFX in comparison to anything. Maybe The Midnight Sky fares best here.
So, it's Tenet then, right? Except Christopher Nolan doesn't have the strongest track record in this branch. The Dark Knight was nominated, sure, but it didn't win. Inception took home the prize. The Dark Knight Rises wasn't nominated. Interstellar won (against a tough field). But Dunkirk wasn't nominated. And Tenet had fewer VFX than Dunkirk, correct?
Interesting to note, Tenet would have fewer Oscar nominations than any other Best Visual Effects winner this decade, save for The Jungle Book (and tied with Ex Machina). But it does have one thing the other winners do, which is a veneer of importance. It has the vibe of a winner and that's probably enough.
Over the last twenty years, this has been a very predictable category, going to more or less the expected nominee with two exceptions: The Golden Compass and Ex Machina.
Ex Machina is the upset that jumps to everyone's mind. However, I think Ex Machina's win obscures the fact that 2015 was a very odd year for the category. The contenders were Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, The Revenant, Star Wars: The Force Awakens... and little Ex Machina, which probably benefited from having a unique take on VFX with a small budget amidst four fairly bloated efforts. So, in this race, what's the Ex Machina? Well, there's more than one small VFX film so I'm not sure that comparison works. Is it Love & Monsters? Is it The One and Only Ivan?
The Golden Compass was a big failed franchise, a box office disaster, with admittedly incredible effects in comparison to Transformers which was a massive franchise launch but with effects that were largely incoherent. The big difference is that nobody seems to think that Mulan or The Midnight Sky has strong VFX in comparison to anything. Maybe The Midnight Sky fares best here.
So, it's Tenet then, right? Except Christopher Nolan doesn't have the strongest track record in this branch. The Dark Knight was nominated, sure, but it didn't win. Inception took home the prize. The Dark Knight Rises wasn't nominated. Interstellar won (against a tough field). But Dunkirk wasn't nominated. And Tenet had fewer VFX than Dunkirk, correct?
Interesting to note, Tenet would have fewer Oscar nominations than any other Best Visual Effects winner this decade, save for The Jungle Book (and tied with Ex Machina). But it does have one thing the other winners do, which is a veneer of importance. It has the vibe of a winner and that's probably enough.
"How's the despair?"
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Mister Tee
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Categories One-by-One: Visual Effects
Since these individual threads were originally my creation, it seems time I initiated one.
The nominees:
Love and Monsters
The Midnight Sky
Mulan
The One and Only Ivan
Tenet
Apart from best picture, I don't think any category had its quality of competition dampened by the pandemic as much as this one. The visual effects branch can occasionally go for out-there candidates we completists dread (Kong: Skull Island!), but generally they favor big-ticket items. And big-ticket items -- summer action blockbusters -- are precisely what disappeared in 2020. Apart from (the poorly-reviewed) Wonder Woman 1984 and Disney's Mulan, they weren't farmed out to streaming; they were simply held back. Had Black Widow/No Time to Die/Dune been on the calendar as planned, this category would likely look very different. What we have instead is a slate of almost all Kong: Skull Islands.
It's harder to pinpoint the weakest candidate on this slate than to identify the strongest. I think maybe The Midnight Sky fares worst, even though its effects (both on earth and in space) are decent enough. But the film is seen as such a dud that it's hard to imagine voters rallying behind it.
Enough people were sick of Disney's cash-in live action remakes that The Lion King fell to 1917 last year, and it's hard for me to imagine Mulan will engender more enthusiasm -- particularly since, aside from some bird transformations, there aren't many eye-popping effects on display.
I know I sort of checked out most of last year, but, I swear to god, I'd never even heard of either Love and Monsters or The One and Only Ivan until they got these nominations. Now having watched both, I think of them in much the same way: they're both staggeringly mediocre films, but do possess decently impressive effects. Of the two, I might lean toward The One and Only Ivan: Babe won this category just for making it look like a pig and some sheep were talking; this film has an entire menagerie not only talking but trekking over highways into the forest. It may be we've come to take such effects for granted in this CGI world, but I was rather impressed.
However...it's hard to bet against Tenet, since Christopher Nolan has been an established favorite in this category, and this film comes closest to being a movie for grown-ups, the recent standard for victory. What works against it: 1) the effects, while respectable, aren't up to Inception-level, and 2) it just feels like such a damn dull choice. That probably won't be enough to defeat it, but there's the bare possibility some voters go elsewhere from boredom. Not how I'd bet, but maybe worth keeping an eye out for.
The nominees:
Love and Monsters
The Midnight Sky
Mulan
The One and Only Ivan
Tenet
Apart from best picture, I don't think any category had its quality of competition dampened by the pandemic as much as this one. The visual effects branch can occasionally go for out-there candidates we completists dread (Kong: Skull Island!), but generally they favor big-ticket items. And big-ticket items -- summer action blockbusters -- are precisely what disappeared in 2020. Apart from (the poorly-reviewed) Wonder Woman 1984 and Disney's Mulan, they weren't farmed out to streaming; they were simply held back. Had Black Widow/No Time to Die/Dune been on the calendar as planned, this category would likely look very different. What we have instead is a slate of almost all Kong: Skull Islands.
It's harder to pinpoint the weakest candidate on this slate than to identify the strongest. I think maybe The Midnight Sky fares worst, even though its effects (both on earth and in space) are decent enough. But the film is seen as such a dud that it's hard to imagine voters rallying behind it.
Enough people were sick of Disney's cash-in live action remakes that The Lion King fell to 1917 last year, and it's hard for me to imagine Mulan will engender more enthusiasm -- particularly since, aside from some bird transformations, there aren't many eye-popping effects on display.
I know I sort of checked out most of last year, but, I swear to god, I'd never even heard of either Love and Monsters or The One and Only Ivan until they got these nominations. Now having watched both, I think of them in much the same way: they're both staggeringly mediocre films, but do possess decently impressive effects. Of the two, I might lean toward The One and Only Ivan: Babe won this category just for making it look like a pig and some sheep were talking; this film has an entire menagerie not only talking but trekking over highways into the forest. It may be we've come to take such effects for granted in this CGI world, but I was rather impressed.
However...it's hard to bet against Tenet, since Christopher Nolan has been an established favorite in this category, and this film comes closest to being a movie for grown-ups, the recent standard for victory. What works against it: 1) the effects, while respectable, aren't up to Inception-level, and 2) it just feels like such a damn dull choice. That probably won't be enough to defeat it, but there's the bare possibility some voters go elsewhere from boredom. Not how I'd bet, but maybe worth keeping an eye out for.