My Award nominations: Original Score

I find myself repeating what I did with my Adapted Screenplay nominees: I hate to be negative on such a great year for film, but I gotta say that it was not a particularly great year for Original Scores specifically. The five listed after the cut are good, but in a normal year I think only a couple of them would have made my ballot. But enough crapping on my own nominees! Here are the five that made it:

My Award nominations: Visual Effects

Let's be honest: For just about everybody, this year's visual effects contest has basically consisted of one movie, and then everything else. But that doesn't mean that the pretenders shouldn't be acknowledged for their stellar work.

So read about the best Visual Effects work of the year (plus the other four) after the jump.

Visual effects bakeoff list revealed

Ten films have advanced as potential nominees for this year's Best Visual Effects Oscar. A nomination is really only a token honour, however, because there's simply no way Gravity loses this to any of the other nine. There is one particularly glaring omission in Man of Steel failing to make it even this far, but bear in mind that Zack Snyder's films have never been nominated for anything by the Academy, despite how effects-heavy they are. So perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised.

The ten that did survive are:

Elysium
Gravity
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Iron Man 3
The Lone Ranger
Oblivion
Pacific Rim
Star Trek Into Darkness
Thor: The Dark World
World War Z

So what takes Man of Steel's place on our predicted five? I'm feeling Elysium or Star Trek could be contenders there, but what do I know?

Review - Man of Steel

With wall-to-wall action that moves faster than a locomotive, Man of Steel reinvigorates a wealth of Superman mythos for a new generation, but is far from an unqualified success. The pairing of producer Christopher Nolan and director Zach Snyder is a bit of an anomaly given their very different directorial styles, but if nothing else, Man of Steel certainly gives you a lot bang for your buck.

The script, scribed by Nolan's Dark Knight co-writer David Goyer, covers not only the already well known origin story of an alien baby who escapes the destruction of his home planet and is raised by a kindly Kansas couple, but also the saga of the man of steel's quest for self-enlightenment and his run-in with his Kryptonian enemy General Zod. That's an awful lot of material to cram into one movie – enough perhaps for two movies, one could argue.