Listened to you fellas describe how The Hobbit looked and it made me wish they filmed Ted that way. It'd look like an episode of Alf!

<edit> Was meant to be funny, on reflection I just sounded ignorant. </edit>

So we got 3/5 and two of our "meh" choices made it.

We considered last year's winner, HUGO, a "meh" too. So if the pattern holds it'll go to AVENGERS (biggest box office), but we'll wait to see what the VFX Predictinator has to say.

Well, I'm not exactly stunned (nor upset) that Avengers made the cut - it IS solid work after all, and I probably should have given more weight to the sizable ILM voting block in the VFX branch.   

And now that Avengers is in the running, I hereby revise my prediction of the eventual winner.  Avengers' "biggest movie of the year" cred beats Hobbit's "they'll be back for the next two years anyway".

So - Avengers for the win, Life of Pi for potential upset.

EDIT:  Just noticed something else - we mentioned Chris Corbould was on the list for three potential nominated projects... none of which were actually nominated.   Ouch.   

But he's already got an Oscar (Inception) and his brother's nominated for Snow White.   He's probably fine.

Yeah, but then they changed it from 10 nominees to "minimum of 5, maximum of 10" and then altered the way BP nominees are selected (they have to get a minimum percentage of the vote, IIRC). TDKR, not really surprisingly, just didn't get the votes.

I just saw Life of Pi, and I'm pretty sure that's going to be the winner. Avengers had some great stuff, but nothing as astonishing as that tiger. I didn't think that special effects could really astonish me any more, but that tiger is just so damn good. They gave it to Hugo last year in a field of big explody sci-fi movies, and I think the same thing's going to happen this year.

Life of Pi is almost entirely digital, if you think about it. The majority of the movie is on a lifeboat in the open ocean, and there was no ocean or ocean creatures. It's all animal effects, but a wide variety of animals. Not to mention the various storm sequences.