Search form

Oscars, Apes and Space, a Love Story

It’s that time of the year again where 6000 male, mostly-white, 60 year olds put on their bi-focal 3D glasses and try to figure out what visual effects are.

It’s that time of the year again where 6000 male, mostly-white, 60 year olds put on their bi-focal 3D glasses and try to figure out what visual effects (VFX) are. There is a strange formula required to win a visual effects Oscar and oddly enough the best candidate doesn’t always win. Firstly, the academy don’t respond well to a sequel -- there is a sense of “been there, done that.” Secondly, they seem to like an obvious in-your-face CG character rather than invisible effects. Finally, there is also a tendency to lean towards a critically acclaimed movie, but as we are painfully aware however, good VFX don’t always come coupled with a good film. Cough. Battleship. Cough...

There is normally a favorite going into awards season (Jurassic Park, 1993, Life of Pi, 2012 and Gravity, 2013 for example) but this year it seems a fairly close race between Interstellar, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and maybe Guardians of the Galaxy. Last week the Visual Effects Society Awards were overwhelmingly swept by Apes with Interstellar and X-Men: Days of Future Past taking a few statues home too. The problem this year is that all of the films seem like sequels. The Marvel films, whether they are original or not, come from the same canon and feel like iterations rather than new work. The VFX in Captain America: The Winter Soldier are fantastic, but we’ve seen the helicarriers before and adding more of them won’t detract from that feeling.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is definitely a sequel and that only leaves Interstellar which unfortunately comes hot on the heels of Gravity’s win from last year. The academy surely won’t vote for ANOTHER space film? It’s a shame because I actually prefer the effects work on Interstellar, (see my thoughts on Gravity) that include a far out scientific recreation of a black hole and a time-bending tesseract sequence that was totally original.

All in all I do think that Apes will take it, with Interstellar close behind. It’s almost a shame we can’t combine the two in some sort of hybrid extravaganza, but then all I can picture is Escape From the Planet of the Apes, and we don’t really want to go there. Do we?