Hee. The whole political side of the oscars cracks me up. I'll say Inception, but that super-fast snow while the van falls off the bridge bugs me.

Oh, haha, you see, you missed the part where thats EXACTLY what they did. It's an easy mistake to make.

I havn't read LoTR so i can't say, but from a strictly filmmaking standpoint, the LoTR movies stand up on there own as complete movies, whereas the Harry potter movies make absoltely no gaddamn sense whatsoever if you havn't read the books, are filled with random wtf's and are just generally bad MOVIES.

So I went to the VFX bakeoff this year, like I have for more than a decade, and watched the presentations for the seven potential nominees.   (I'm not an Academy voter, but anyone can actually attend the event.) 

This year was very different than any previous year because of the rules change that allowed for five nominations instead of three.  So instead of "Which three will make the cut?"  the question was "Which two are gonna be not-quite-good-enough?"  And with the votes being split so much finer now, handicapping the final nominees suddenly got much harder.

Coming out the door, I told the friends I was with that Scott Pilgrim was dead.  They didn't believe me, but I was pretty darn sure we'd just seen it lose, judging from the vibe in the room after the clip screening.   

I also said the Scott Pilgrim FX reel had instantly shifted the movie from my "gotta see that soon" list to my "good god, I don't EVER want to see that" list.

I realized too late that I'd said all the above while standing five feet away from the Scott Pilgrim FX team.  Awkward.

Ten, twenty years from now, Scott Pilgrim will maybe be looked back on as a classic and maybe even quaint, like watching the original King Kong or something.    But right now, if you go to the FX bakeoff and look at the roped-off Academy member section, you see a hell of a lot of gray hair.   And I suspect that a significant number of the old fogeys - like me - got about three minutes into the Scott P. fx reel and then just started praying for it to stop hurting us.     Maybe it's a good movie as a whole, but that FX reel was the filmic equivalent of waterboarding.  Sorry Scott.  Next!

Hereafter surprised me, it's not a wall-to-wall fx movie, it basically just has the tidal wave sequence and not much else fx-wise.  But that sequence is perfection.   it does what FX are actually supposed to do - support the story being told.   The tidal wave scene is brutal and horrifying and completely works.   

I still am not particularly interested in the rest of the movie - apparently it's about ghosts or something - but that first seven minutes is a work of art.  Even so, I didn't think there'd be enough support in the room to have Hereafter make the cut, and I'm extremely pleased that it did.   For once, "best fx" didn't just mean "most fx".

Inception - a movie I'm completely impressed by on all levels.  I'm just not sure I like it.   I saw it when it came out and then promptly mostly forgot everything about it.   But in the FX reel, when the kid from 3rd Rock From the Sun started running around the spinny corridor, that was a guaranteed nomination right there, the rest of the reel was almost unnecessary.

Iron Man 2 - sequels are tough, often they don't make the cut if they're just repeating fx from the first one without bringing anything new to the party.  Iron Man 2 was looking a little repetitive at first, but when that suit-in-a-suitcase popped open, an entire audience of jaded fx people audibly went "ooooo" in unison.      Bing.  Nomination.  Done.

Alice in Wonderland - a movie I had zero interest in seeing going in, now I'm kinda interested.  Tim Burton doing what Tim Burton does, so I dunno if the story is any good, but those were some pretty pictures.

Alice was of the two movies presented in 3-D (Tron being the other), and there couldn't be more difference between them as far as the 3D effects.    Both got questions about the 3D, for Tron the questioner said essentially, So how come your 3D effects weren't painful and bad?  And the answer was "because we designed the 3D from the start to not call too much attention to itself."   

Alice got a similar question, except it was "so did you do anything different fx-wise once the film became a retro-active 3d movie?"  And Ken Ralston said - as accurately as I can quote him -  "We had nothing to do with that grr em hmmm rmmm grr any other questions?"   

Me, I liked Alice a lot better after the first minute of the reel, when I closed one eye so the 3D went away.

Harry Potter Whichever One It Is - the perennial bridesmaid of the FX Oscar.   Every single one has been in the bakeoff, and almost none of them got nominated.    The fx have never been any less than great (assuming we nobly avert our eyes from the Quidditch match in the first movie and speak no more of it), and yet every year Harry never seems to make the final cut.  I half-assumed this year would be the same, since everybody knows there's one more coming and they could just wait and give that one the "Return of the King Award For Doing Lots of Stuff" in 2012.   

The Potter fx were just as good as ever this year, but I suspect it's mostly just the shift from three to five nominees that got Harry through the gate.  So congrats Harry, but don't write a speech yet.  You won't need it until next year.

And finally - Tron.  A movie I had no desire to see.  A movie whose very existence I bemoan and shake my fists at the gods for allowing to happen.   Until I saw the FX reel.  Jeezus.   Sure, it's all just eye candy, but more delicious candy my eyes have ne'er consumed. 

Crap.  Now I gotta watch that thing.   Tron is the yin to Scott Pilgrim's yang.

And the FX supervisor did exactly the right thing in his Tron introduction - he reminded the audience that the original Tron was excluded from FX consideration because computers were "cheating".   And all those gray heads laughed and nodded at the memory of the shortsighted gray heads who ran things back then.   

And then the reel, which was so incredible that even a hater like me wanted to see that movie.  And the question after about how even the 3D was so nicely done... and so on.  Add it up and no way, no day does Tron not get nominated.  Locked, done, moving on.

And somehow... it didn't.  I have no way, no way at all to explain how that could possibly have happened.    Honestly, I am at a loss.   Not since Revenge of the Sith NOT getting a nomination have I been this surprised.

So anyway, with Tron shockingly out of the running Inception is gonna win the VFX award in a walk.     Because the final winners are voted upon by all members of the Academy, regardless of their branch, so the techie awards invariably go to the hit movies because everybody saw them. 

And because the 3rd Rock Kid in the spinny corridor was cool.

I will (carefully) probably still give Pilgrim a view someday, mostly because I love love LOVE everything else Edgar Wright has ever done.   

But when the head of the Academy VFX branch goes onstage after the screening of your reel and... well he didn't quite apologize for it, but he said "bear in mind that when we see VFX reels we're often looking at the loudest, busiest scenes from a movie" and "by the way, we're running these reels at 80% percent of normal volume"...well...

I think he was trying to help, but he just underscored what I and a lot of other people in the room were thinking - the Scott Pilgrim reel was torment to sit through.

I once described some DIF movie - Transformers, maybe - as the movie equivalent of a toddler banging a pot with a spoon and screaming "YAAAAAAAAH!".   Without the context of the rest of the movie, that's exactly what the Scott Pilgrim reel was, except the toddler was Michael Cera.   It was fifteen minutes of Michael Cera facing off against a series of other characters and literally screaming YAAAAAAAAH, and it was painful and annoying.

Bear in mind that I'm an old person.  I don't pop a Pavlovian woody just because I hear a Nintendo sound effect.   I do not voluntarily listen to what I assume they considered the "music" in that movie.   I have read approximately six comics in my life and none of them were Scott Pilgrim. 

But that's all fine with me, because they did not make Scott Pilgrim for people like me, and I'm not in the least upset about that.
 
But there's an art to assembling an Academy VFX reel, because you're gonna be showing it to a roomful of people who are exactly like me and seeking their approval.   The Scott Pilgrim team were uniformly young and British and first-time nominees, and I suspect have never been through this process before.   I don't think they presented their movie correctly to that audience, plain and simple.  A differently-arranged fx reel might have gotten them a nomination, I genuinely believe that.   

Again, twenty years from now when I and all those other gray hairs are dead, Scott Pilgrim may be a movie that all those future Academy members look back on fondly.  But this sure wasn't their year.

So there's 7 clips and each is 20min long, right? I'm just curious: how big is the crowd, and how many are civilians? Is it free admission? Is there a podcast of the Q&A?

I love video games, I love fighting, I love Edgar Wright, and I'd HATE to watch just the fights back to back.

Beverly Hills, CA – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that 10 films remain in the running in the Visual Effects category for the 84th Academy Awards®.

The films are listed below in alphabetical order:

“Captain America: The First Avenger”
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2″
“Hugo”
“Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol”
“Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides”
“Real Steel”
“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”
“Transformers: Dark of the Moon”
“The Tree of Life”
“X-Men: First Class”

All members of the Visual Effects Branch will be invited to view 10-minute excerpts from each of the 10 shortlisted films on Thursday, January 19. Following the screenings, the members will vote to nominate five films for final Oscar consideration.

Trey will have to weigh in, but I don't see the win going to anything but Harry Potter or Planet of the Apes.

Well, first they'll have to get nominated, but as I said last year (readable earlier in this thread) I suspect Harry P. will get nominated this year, retroactively, for a decade's worth of almost entirely awesome work.

As for whether it will ultimately WIN, well, that's up to the voters of the entire Academy, not just the VFX branch.  But I think there's enough general awareness of the Potter films to make it the front runner.

I agree that Apes is one of the few contenders on the list that could spoil it for Harry, but I think the one Harry really should worry about is Tree of Life (assuming IT makes the cut).  The movie has that "important" feel to it that Academy voters love to vote for in other categories, and hardly ever get to vote on in VFX.

This is all being said before the bakeoff of course, the vibe on the night might be different and my suspicions may change.   I'm planning to go, as usual.   Who's in?

Interesting to note that there's been another rules change this year - last year they upped the final nominees to five (before last year, there were only three VFX finalists), and this year they upped the bakeoff list from seven to ten films... and meanwhile cut the length of the reels from fifteen minutes down to ten.  (Understandable because otherwise the event would end at two in the damn morning.)   So this year there will be many more people staggering on and off the stage, all with 30% less screen time to showcase their fx.   It'll be interesting to see if that changes the dynamics at all.