High stakes: Oscar’s VFX race to be long one this year

‘The Jungle Book,’ ‘Rogue One’ and ‘Doctor Strange’ expected to lead in award category, with numerous other contenders

The Academy’s visual effects branch will have its work cut out in narrowing this year’s big-screen spectacles down to 10 semi-finalists for the bakeoff stage in a few weeks, let alone settling on five nominees to fill out the Oscar ballot.

At least two films are all but locked for recognition and one of them we can probably feel safe in calling sight-unseen: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. No one will get a look at the film until the December 10 but the franchise’s history in this category is difficult to ignore. The only Star Wars film to be dismissed by the visual effects branch was 2005’s Revenge of the Sith. Not only that but visual effects play into Rogue One’s very existence: Oscar-winning VFX supervisor John Knoll conceived the story by plucking it from the opening crawl that first set the stage for audiences way back in 1977.

Also strong in the category is Disney’s The Jungle Book, reports Variety. Indeed, the lush and detailed environments conjured by Weta and MPC (around principle photography shot in a downtown Los Angeles warehouse) might as well be considered the frontrunner in the category. Robert Legato and his team boast seven Oscar nominations and three wins between them, for films as varied as Apollo 13, Titanic, I Robot, Avatar and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

A notable latter-year entry is Marvel’s Doctor Strange, which dazzled audiences with mind-bending effects. Captain America: Civil War also deserves a mention. Some of the most impressive VFX elements in the film were of the Ant-Man variety, though that Marvel film somewhat surprisingly failed to receive a nomination here. Nevertheless, supervisors Dan DeLeeuw and Russell Earl were nominated for Captain America: The Winter Soldier so it’s definitely a possibility.

That’s four films so far, and three of them come from Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year. Another contender, Warcraft, disappointed at the domestic box office but could be favoured in ILM’s ranks. Two-time Oscar winner Bill Westenhofer leads a star-studded team that has been recognised by the Academy for films like The Avengers and The Revenant. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them might be an on the outside or it could be right in the wheelhouse.

Perhaps the branch will drift over to something new. Passengers could fit the bill, with a huge spaceship build, various environments within the ship, outer space and, of course, the zero-gravity swimming pool sequence seen in trailers.

There are also a few contenders below the radar that are worth keeping an eye on, like Steven Spielberg’s The BFG. But Disney will focus on its more successful films. Robert Zemecki’s World War II drama Allied is also there, as is another ILM project Deepwater Horizon.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 27^th, 2016.

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