Best Visual Effects

The semi-finalists for the Best Visual Effects Academy Award have been announced.  Five of these ten titles will be nominated when the announcements are made January 10th.

• The Amazing Spider-Man
• Cloud Atlas
• The Dark Knight Rises
• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
• John Carter
• Life of Pi
• Marvel's The Avengers
• Prometheus
• Skyfall
• Snow White & the Huntsman

The lists of titles snubbed include: The Hunger Games, The Impossible, Total Recall, Looper.

Interesting to note that The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall would be somewhat anomalous in that both use more practical visual effects (stunts and mis en scene tricks) than CGI, prominent in the remaining films, which might make both films vulnerable in the end.  Life of Pi looks like the only one of the ten with a Best Picture chance, which might bode well not just for a nomination, but the eventual win-- the past three years the Visual Effects winner was a Best Picture nominee (Hugo, Inception and Avatar.)

Cloud Atlas, the box office dud from the Wachowski Bros. and Tom Twyker may still be an Oscar nominee.

Only four these films were not presented in 3-D (Cloud Atlas, The Dark Knight Rises, Skyfall and Snow White and the Huntsman.)

Two of these films, Cloud Atlas and John Carter were two of the costliest bombs of the 2012, so it will be interesting to see if either can gain any traction in the one category that typically favors blockbusters.

Each film will present a clip reel and panel for members of the Visual Effects branch of Academy shortly before the nominations are announced.