The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the longlist of movies which will be contending for the Visual Effects Oscar next year. As with the recently announced animations longlist (see here) the Academy is initially announcing a longlist (in this case 15 films) which will be narrowed down to a final seven in January, which will then be the shortlist which the Academy members vote on for the actual Oscars, with the final nominations for the 80th Academy Awards being announced on the 22nd of January.
As you would expect the visual effects category contains more than its fair share of science fiction, fantasy and comics-inspired flicks, including “Sunshine”, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”, “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End“, “Spider-Man 3″, “300” and even “I am Legend” which has only just opened in the US (the UK gets it at the end of next week; I’m torn over wanting to see it but being worried because I rate the original 50s novel as one of the best works of Cold War paranoia in 20th century fiction and I’m not sure they are going to honour it. Guess I’ll find out next week) and the also-just-released “The Golden Compass”, based on Philip Pullman’s excellent series of novels.
In a break from tradition two animated feature films have also made the longlist: “Ratatouille” and “Beowulf“. As the Hollywood Reporter notes there is some precedent for this as Tim Burton’s (quite brilliant) Nightmare Before Christmas was nominated in the Visual Effects category back in 1994, but this was before the introduction of the Best Animated Feature Oscar category, so it looks like this inclusion is taking account of the enormous work done by animators and the way different strands of film production continue to converge.
“It’s great for animation people, especially in computer graphics films, where there’s a huge amount of visual effects that is very similar in complexity to the kind of work we find in live action,” Pixar’s Jim Morris (producer on their upcoming Wall-E), speaking in the Hollywood Reporter. Beowulf’s visual effects supervisor Jerome Chen agreed with this and predicted that we were likely to see more of this in future Oscar nominations, especially with more films set to mix live action and motion capture animation.
Mon, Dec 17, 2007
Art and animation, Awards, Film, TV and radio