Final voting is February 11-18. The 97th The Oscars The telecast will air on Sunday, March 2 and air live on ABC at 7pm ET/4pm PT. We’ll be updating our picks throughout awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all of ours Oscars predictions 2025.
Race condition
The Best Visual Effects nominees are “Alien: Romulus,” “Better Man,” “Dune: Part Two,” “The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” and “Evil.” While the race has been shaped as a tie between “Kingdom” and “Better Man” (both from Wētā FX), “Dune: Part Two” has emerged as the favorite for its epic work, based on the Oscar-winning “Dune.” But “Kingdom” certainly deserves the franchise’s first win. The biggest obstacle has been the acting industry’s reluctance towards performance capture.
Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part 2” is more exciting and emotional, with Paul (Timothee Chalamet) leading the nomadic Fremen in a holy war against Arrakis. VFX supervisor Paul Lambert and his Oscar-winning “Dune” DNEG team upped the ante with much more visceral action, especially when Paul and the Fremen rode the massive CG sandworms into battle against the Sardaukar. For Paul’s first ride, they created a separate “mask” unit, with Chalamet standing on a gimbal platform designed by SFX supervisor Gerd Nefzer as the sand mask’s set, with grappling devices imitating the Fremen hooks and surrounded by an industrial fan blowing sand on the set.
Wes Ball’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” picks up the saga of Caesar (Andy Serkis) 300 years later, and dives deeper into the now dominant ape civilization. Wētā greatly upgraded its photorealistic performance capture animation and VFX, leveraging technology from the previous “Apes” trilogy along with the Oscar-winning “Avatar: The Way of Water.” In addition, Ball used far more VFX action set pieces (33 minutes are all digital – a franchise first) by incorporating his hand-held, one-shot visual style.
Michael Gracey’s “Better Man” showcases a very different Wētā simian style (production VFX supervised by Luke Millar). The CG chimpanzee conceit came about when Williams told the director that he felt like a performing monkey in his youth. This became the driving metaphor for Williams’ rise and fall as a result of arrested development and addiction. Wētā adopted a more human approach to mimic Williams’ young-to-adult mannerisms (captured prominently by actor Jonno Davies). The highlight is the elaborate musical sequences, particularly “Rock DJ”, which was shot on London’s Regent Street over four nights and stitched together as a single shot.
Jon M. Chu’s populist Oz musical, “Wicked,” tells the origin story of Elphaba/the Wicked Witch (Oscar nominee Cynthia Erivo) and Galinda/Glinda the Good Witch (Oscar nominee Ariana Grande). Aesthetically, it leans towards magical realism for its depiction of Oz. ILM and Framestore shared VFX duties, with ILM’s Pablo Helman serving as production supervisor. The CG work includes hundreds of animals (via Framestore and ILM’s monkeys), plenty of set additions and the sensational “Defying Gravity” number, with Erivo on wires against blue screen in collaboration with special effects supervisor Paul Corbould.
Fede Álvarez’s “Alien: Romulus,” a stand-alone set between “Alien” and “Aliens,” is about young colonists who encounter the parasitic Xenomorphs while cleaning up an abandoned space station. In a throwback to the original, there is a clever combination of animatronics and CG. ILM joins Image Engine, Tippett Studio and Wētā (production overseen by Oscar winner Eric Barba of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”). There are Facehuggers and Xenomorphs (including a cool zero-gravity fight sequence), a hybrid human/Xenomorph from Wētā, and a demonic android named Rook who resembles Ash (Ian Holm) from “Alien”, using a Legacy doll and Metaphysic Live, the generative AI software from Metaphysic, to transfer face-captured and de-aged performance to puppets.
The nominees are listed below in order of likelihood of winning.
Challenger
“Dune: Part Two”
“The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”
“Better Man”
“Evil”
“Alien: Romulus”
