Academy News: Consideration Films in 2 Categories and a New Exhibition

Next, the Academy will screen fifteen minute clip reels for each film in front of the Visual Effects Award Nominating Committee on February 5, and then those members will vote for three of the films to be nominated.

George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic made out big as usual, nearly dominating this list, as they were responsible for the visual effects in four of the films. It certainly shows how much digital visual effects are becoming the new norm, as all but XXX almost completely relied on computers to achieve their visual effects. And where a few years back, The Phantom Menace was revolutionary in its creation of a digital character, look how many we have now. From the much praised creation Gollum in The Two Towers, to the many digital characters including Yoda that populate Episode II of the Star Wars saga, to the aliens of Men in Black II, to the surveillance spiders in Minority Report ... yes indeed, digital characters are becoming more the norm.

I think Gollum in the new Lord of the Rings film really represents a major step into full blown acceptance of digital characters, as it was truly a seamless effect, where you don't even notice that it's a computer generated character.

So from these seven films, I think the ultimate nominees will be The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Minority Report, and Spiderman ... that's right, I think it's very possible that Star Wars Episode II may be overlooked, especially since the landmark visual effects in Episode I went overlooked for The Matrix in 1999.

From those three nominees then, I would hope the Academy would select the very-deserving Minority Report, but I have a feeling Gollum and some of those epic battles will overwhelm the Academy again, and will follow-up the original's win for Visual Effects last year with another one this year.

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