Final voting is February 11-18. The 97th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 2, and air live on ABC at 7 p.m. ET/ 4 p.m. PT. We update our picks through awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2025 Oscar predictions.
The State of the Race
The Best Visual Effects nominees are “Alien: Romulus,” “Better Man,” “Dune: Part Two,” “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” and “Wicked.” While the race has been shaping up as a simian battle between “Kingdom” and “Better Man” (both from Wētā FX), “Dune: Part Two” has emerged as the favorite for its epic work, building off the Oscar-winning “Dune.” However, “Kingdom” is certainly deserving of the franchise’s first win. The biggest hurdle has been the acting branch’s dislike of performance capture.
Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part 2” is more exciting and emotional, with Paul (Timothée Chalamet) leading the nomadic Fremen in a holy war on Arrakis. VFX supervisor Paul Lambert and his Oscar-winning “Dune” DNEG team ramped up everything with much more visceral action, particularly with Paul and the Fremen riding the massive CG sandworms into battle against the Sardaukar. For Paul’s first ride, they created a separate “worm” unit, in which Chalamet stood on a platform with gimbals designed by SFX supervisor Gerd Nefzer as the sandworm set piece, with gripping devices imitating the Fremen hooks and surrounded by an industrial fan that blew sand on the set.
Wes Ball’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” kicks off the post-Caesar (Andy Serkis) saga 300 years later, diving deeper into the now dominant ape civilization. Wētā greatly upgraded its photoreal performance capture animation and VFX, leveraging tech from the previous “Apes” trilogy along with the Oscar-winning “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Additionally, Ball made use of a lot more VFX action set pieces (33 minutes are entirely digital — a franchise first) by incorporating his hand-held, single-take visual style.
Michael Gracey’s “Better Man” shows off a completely different Wētā simian style (production VFX supervised by Luke Millar). The CG chimp 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 addictions. Wētā adopted a more human approach to mimic Williams’ mannerisms from youngster to adult (performance-captured by actor Jonno Davies). The highlight is the elaborate musical sequences, particularly “Rock DJ,” which was shot on London’s Regent Street throughout four evenings and stitched together like a single shot.
Jon M. Chu’s populist Oz musical, “Wicked,” tells the origin story of Elphaba/the Wicked Witch (Oscar-nominated Cynthia Erivo) and Galinda/Glinda the Good Witch (Oscar-nominated Ariana Grande). Aesthetically, it leans into magical realism for its depiction of Oz. ILM and Framestore split VFX duties, with ILM’s Pablo Helman serving as production supervisor. The CG work includes hundreds of animals (via Framestore and ILM’s monkeys), lots of set extensions, and the showstopping “Defying Gravity” number, with Erivo on wires against blue screen in collaboration with special effects supervisor Paul Corbould.
Fede Álvarez’s “Alien: Romulus,” a standalone set between “Alien” and “Aliens,” concerns young colonists who encounter the parasitic Xenomorphs while scavenging a derelict space station. In a throwback to the original, there’s a deft combination of animatronics and CG. ILM joins Image Engine, Tippett Studio, and Wētā (production supervised 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 diabolical android named Rook that resembles Ash (Ian Holm) from “Alien,” using a Legacy puppet and Metaphysic Live, the generative AI software from Metaphysic, for transferring the facially-captured and de-aged performance to the puppet.
Nominees are listed below in order of likelihood they will win.
Contenders
“Dune: Part Two”
“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”
“Better Man”
“Wicked”
“Alien: Romulus”
