OSCAR CIRCUIT: VISUAL EFFECTS
By: Myles Hughes
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Is the Visual Effects race already locked up?
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The Nominees:
Avatar, Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham, and Andy Jones
District 9, Dan Kaufman, Peter Muyzers, Robert Habros, and Matt Aitken
Star Trek, Roger Guyett, Russell Earl, Paul Kavanagh, and Burt Dalton
Presumptive favorite to win – Avatar
Spoiler – District 9
Biggest surprise – None
Snub(s): Where the Wild Things Are
It would be pretty hard to see anything but Avatar winning this category. True, the effects in District 9 and Star Trek were effective
and immersive, but Avatar truly stepped up the bar for visual effects and cinema as a whole, and should be justly rewarded.
Since the category’s inception in 1978 (the first ever winner was Star Wars), there has almost always been a clear-cut winner.
Films like Alien, E.T., Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Jurassic Park, The Matrix, and Lord of the Rings; films that have shown a
significant step forward in the field of Special Effects. James Cameron himself has directed no less than four previous winners
(Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2, and Titanic), and there is little to support the argument that his latest epic won’t follow suit.
Of Avatar’s nominees, Letteri is a previous winner for the latter two Lord of the Rings and King Kong, Rosenbaum won for
Forrest Gump, and Jones was nominated for I, Robot. All of District 9’s contenders are first-time nominees, and out of Star
Trek's group, Dalton won for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, while Guyett was nominated for the third Harry Potter and
Earl was nominated for Transformers. Almost every prognosticator you care to name is predicting Avatar for the win (including
our entire staff), and it would frankly take a miracle for either of its competitors to pull an upset.
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