Oscar 2016 - VFX & Makeup

Yup, I know. I'm late with the entry promised for last week. Compensating with a 2-in-1. Sort of. Meaning that I thought there's room for both VFX and makeup today, since anyway we mostly have overlapping titles.

"Ex Machina" starts the nominations series for visual effects. I find it a bit as a "category fill" item here. Maybe I'm subjective, since I found the movie way more pretentious than what it actually delivers. Of course, Ava - who's 99% the subject of the nomination, looks good, but I don't find it groundbreaking in any way. And we have groundbreaking material below ...
"Mad Max: Fury Road" is my prediction for both VFX and Makeup. I won't write again all what I already did in the movie's entry last year. What we have here is a resurrection of "for real" VFX = non-CGI (although we have CGI too, as you can observe below). It's the only movie I've noticed using real staged visual effects at this scale in a long long time. About the makeup, I'm no expert, bt it's clearly the most "visible" among all nominees.
"The 100-Year-Old-Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared" is a pleasant surprise in this year's nominees list. It scored in makeup, and I can say it's a lesson given to some Hollywood titles, such as "J. Edgar" for instance, in respect to "aging" a character. The year passing on a guy's face looks much more natural in this Swedish comedy that's a sort of a northern Forrest Gump, much much colder, and way less serious.
"Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is seen by many as a VFX winner. I disagree. It looks too ... common for me. It's simply in the same line of recently released movies. Besides the swords, what we see here is not far from what we also saw in "Transformers", "Avengers", etc...
"The Martian" offers planet Mars as a VFX subject. Again, it looks like an entry that stays in the average range of what we typically have here. More I would say, it's even "eclipsed" by last year's "Interstellar" :) ...
"The Revenant" scored nominations on both VFX and Makeup. Unfortunately the clip below is centered on the second, but it's the only I found which displays a couple frames from a scene that I say it makes it the main contender against "Mad Max" for VFX ( and also my wishful winner :) ). It's of course the bear scene, which I think we can consider the next level in CGI, at least from what I've seen by now (maybe "Planet of the Apes" gets slightly close). Well, we'll see where the votes are going ...

Oscar 2013 - Makeup

It's possible that some to believe that I went nuts since I'm writing about makeup, but I have to pretty good reasons: 1. it's the only place where I have the opportunity to talk about a movie, generally speaking 2. I needed some short activity to get me sleepy at this hour :) So ...

"Hitchcock" is the title about I was saying above, which is actually quite clear regarding the topic. I can't say it's a masterpiece but I think it's the best biopic I've seen in the last years (and yes, I've seen that thing called "King's Speech" which not even today I don't know how it managed to nail the Oscar for best picture). As subject, the movie revolves on the time piece around shooting "Psycho". I won't say more besides that the way this is handled as script is very clever. About Anthony Hopkins, I think he had better parts, but what's more interesting on the acting side here is James D'Arcy as Anthony Perkins. Although the screen time is quite short, it's incredible how well this guy can enter into the role to say it bluntly. And of course, another reason to watch this was Scarlett Johansson, but for that I'm extremely subjective :) I think I was supposed to talk about makeup though ... Well .. not much to be said here .. Going forward ...

"The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" is my preference on this category, not that I have any expertise but more to compensate some credit assumed by the VFX team versus makeup, with which I'm not really agreeing ... However, the Oscar goes (probably) to ...

"Les Miserables" .. where I don't have more to say than that I have no idea how Jean Valjean seems to get younger at some moment .. But, maybe I'm blind or this is also an Oscar worthy effect ...