The old cooking adage of the proof being in the pudding was certainly the case for the annual Oscars visual effects bakeoff, held Thursday night at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' headquarters in Beverly Hills. Seven films presented at the event -- Australia, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Dark Knight, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Iron Man, Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor -- and succeeded in making the case that 2008 was an impressive year for visual effects.

But the evening was all about whittling this list of seven down to three films that will be the official nominees for the 81st annual Academy Awards, which will be held Feb. 22 at the Kodak Theater.

For many, the event began with the annual reception held a few short blocks away at Kate Mantilini, where visual effects artists and execs, publicists and journos and many former vfx Oscar winners congregate for drinks, a buffet meal and a chance to socialize with their colleagues.

The socializing continued as people made their way to the Academy's spacious Samuel Goldwyn Theater, which filled to capacity as the 7:30 p.m. start time neared.

Introducing the event was Bill Taylor, the governor of the visual effects branch, who welcomed the "visual effects desperadoes" and explained the rules: The nominees for each film had five minutes to introduce their clips of finished footage from the film, which ran 15 minutes, and then had three minutes afterward to answer questions from branch members. A red light was to come on to indicate time's up -- and while it failed to activate on Taylor's cue, it worked fine during the main event. At the end of the presentations, Taylor continued, vfx branch members had 15 minutes to vote for their top three choices and drop their ballots off in the bins monitored by officers from the official Oscars accounting and tabulation firm of PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Taylor said the steering committee that had helped determine which films advanced to the bakeoff was the largest they had ever had, with 43 members.

Hellboy II was the largest character animation project ever undertaken by Double Negative. © Universal.

The presentation order was determined by lot with overall visual effects supervisors presenting the reels. Up first was Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and Michael J. Wassel introduced the clip, running through the major sequences in the Guillermo del Toro film and explaining the use of six digital doubles and 24 CG characters, and the techniques used to create them. One sequence, in which a fertility goddess crashes through a wall, used motion control, prompting Wassel to joke: "Guillermo told me if I mentioned motion control, I'd be killed." The clip featured such major sequences as the Troll Market, the battle with the giant plant creature at the Brooklyn Bridge and the final battle with the mechanical Golden Army. Questions afterward concerned the methods used for the plant creature as he pulled his roots out of a building crumbling to the ground that was created with both miniature and CG effects, and referenced a clip on YouTube of a roadside bomb in Iraq.