Moments ago, Variety revealed the finalists for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. The twenty films you see below will compete for the Oscar, while movies like Cocaine Bear, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Oppenheimer, and more are now out of the running. The finalists include many of the expected contenders, alongside some surprises like Barbie, The Boys in the Boat, and Godzilla Minus One. The list will whittle down again, to just ten, with our eventual winner coming from that lot, after a final winnowing down to five nominees.
Here are the twenty finalists for Best Visual Effects:
- “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quanumania” (Marvel Studios)
- “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” (Warner Bros.)
- “Barbie” (Warner Bros.)
- “The Boys in the Boat” (Amazon MGM Studios)
- “The Creator” (20th Century Studios)
- “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” (Paramount Pictures)
- “Godzilla: Minus One” (Toho)
- “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” (Marvel Studios)
- “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” (Walt Disney Pictures)
- “Killers of the Flower Moon” (Apple Original Films/Paramount Pictures)
- “The Marvels” (Marvel Studios)
- “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” (Paramount Pictures)
- “Napoleon” (Apple Original Films/Sony Pictures)
- “Nyad” (Netflix)
- “Poor Things” (Searchlight Pictures)
- “Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire” (Netflix)
- “Society of the Snow” (Netflix)
- “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” (Sony Pictures)
- “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” (Paramount Pictures)
- “Wonka” (Warner Bros.)
Source: Variety



Man, this Godzilla Minus One just became this phenomenon while I wasn’t even looking…
One of my favorite things about international cinema is that something I literally had never heard of a month prior can explode onto the scene stateside and suddenly become something I have to see and form an opinion on.