My Award nominations: Production Design

Here's a category that's absolutely stuffed this year. It killed me to decide on that fifth spot, as it forced me to leave out the outstanding work done in films like Her and Inside Llewyn Davis. But you can see the Production Design jobs that did survive the cut below:

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.

Art Directors Guild nominees

The parade of guild announcements marches on with Art Directors Guild. Will we find all of the Oscar nominees in the fifteen films honoured by the ADG? Not necessarily. Five of the last 25 Oscar nominees in this category were ones passed over by the guild, so it's not lights out yet for Oz the Great and Powerful or The Invisible Woman, although there's certainly enough good work this year to keep them off the final ballot.

The nominees and my commentaries after the cut:

Review - Pacific Rim

In yet another summer bursting at the seams with sequels and franchise tentpoles, some of us can be forgiven for chomping at the bit for any blockbuster that wasn't made simply to sell tickets to an established fanbase of some proven brand. We get it this year in the form of Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro's sloppy kiss to the subgenre of “kaiju eiga”; the Japanese monster movie. It's debatable whether or not Pacific Rim is the best of this year's big, loud, spectacular summer blockbusters, but it cannot be denied that the movie is big, that it is loud, and that it is spectacular.

The original premise behind Pacific Rim – “original” insomuch that it was not directly adapted from preexisting source material, although decades of kaiju eiga and anime/manga, from Godzilla to Neon Genesis Evangelion and more, serve as its inspiration – was initially concocted by screenwriter Travis Beacham. In his story, we are plunged into a world that has been at war with malicious alien life for some years now. A brief expository prologue sets the stage: from a space-time rift between two tectonic plates on the floor of the Pacific, skyscraping monstrosities (the kaiju) emerge and lay waste to coastal cities.