Best of 2013: Visual Effects & Makeup

What do you know, twice in one day!

Best Visual Effects

• Timothy Webber, et. al. for Gravity, for its prodigious and utterly phenomenal force of power, staging every effects' painstaking detail across an array of new, authentic settings, while richly culminating the vastness of its protagonist's surroundings.

• Chris Godfrey, et. al. for The Great Gatsby, for better and worse, aiding Luhrmann's particular brand of glamour and extravagant artifice to bring Fitzgerald's world to life, using digital intervention to induce most of the fabulous locations, color schemes and party guests.

• Scott Farrar, Matt Johnson, et. al. for World War Z, for flavoring zombie warfare with bold and plausibly chaotic visual concepts (the zombies climbing the wall) and personality, keeping scenes like the airplane crash and the rooftop escape so in tune with its action rhythms.

Honorable Mentions are few and far between, since I missed a good handful of the films that usually make a play for this category (The Lone Ranger, Oblivion, Pacific Rim) and some of the ones that I did see (Elysium, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Thor: The Dark World) have some stimulating moments of CGI, but just as many bombastic or clunky ones. That being said, there was a lot to admire about the large-scale movements in Man of Steel and Iron Man 3, both of which strike me as minor entries into the Superhero genre (well, Man of Steel is a lot worse than Iron Man 3), but also happen to contain some of the genre's most sleekly executed, effects-driven passages in some time. I chose to revert back to the old rules of the Academy for this category, limiting myself to three nominees considering the scarcity of possibilities, but if the inconsistency bothers you that much, you can place those two in the last slots. Star Trek Into Darkness also has some galvanizing moments of visual extravagance, but to be honest, if I were asked I wouldn't be able to distinguish any of them from its predecessor. Meanwhile, Oz the Great and Powerful manages to avoid the garish pitfalls of its similarly conceived cinematic cousin, Alice in Wonderland, with some truly eye-catching visuals, but I thought a lot of the character designs fell flat. And on a much smaller scale, Post Tenebras Lux and John Dies at the End evoke two strong, thematically vital and singular visual ideas through CGI (the "Red Devil" and the soy sauce, respectively), and, saving Gravity, easily top any of the previously mentioned films in sheer technical ingenuity, for sure.

And those are literally all of the films that I seriously considered from what I've seen.

Best Makeup & Hairstyling

• Ma Kalaadevi Ananda, Adruitha Lee, et. al. for 12 Years a Slave, for acing subtle gradations of scarring and labor-induced grime, leaving room for its stony illustrations of devastating, granitic and paralyzing depictions of cruelty to count for a lot.

• Lori McCoy-Bell, Evelyne Noraz, et. al. for American Hustle, for so many variations on deliciously belabored character beats, deceitfully echoed through arduously composed, era-specific styles.

• Kate Biscoe, Marie Larkin, et. al. for Behind the Candelabra, for not only nailing the prosthetic achievements drawn from the plastic surgery story arch, but for lending them such unexpected poignancy as the characters age with them, and also for the convincing look of Liberace.

• Gretchen Davis, Yvette Rivas, et. al. for Blue Jasmine, for smartly painting the casually fabulous posturing of Jasmine in the flashbacks (also the crucial handsomeness of Baldwin's character) and allowing it to slowly build to that indelible park-bench meltdown, displaying her ruined dye-job.

• Nicki Ledermann, Cassandra Saulter, et. al. for Inside Llewyn Davis, for expressing lived-in character detail with Llewyn's raggedy, slightly graying hair and understated aging lines of his face, telling mournful prior chapters to Llewyn's life all on their own.

Yes, I technically dipped into the TV world with Behind the Candelabra, but I figured I'd let it slide, considering that this is the supposed swan song of a big-time celebrity director that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and had a theatrical release across the pond, so it's status as a "TV Movie" is arbitrary at best. Besides, not to spoil everything, but this is the only place it will be recognized.

Honorable Mentions to the makeup teams behind The Bling Ring's flashily groomed nuances; Antiviral's satirically brazen realizations of the latest lines in celebrity flues and cold sores; War Witch's haunting and mythic conjuring of maybe-hallucinated/maybe-real band of spirits; Dallas Buyer's Club's low-budget tackling of declining health (even if it could use a scene or two of visibly sick patients), Lovelace's bouncy, texturized locks and fun 70s styles in the American Hustle vein; The Broken Circle Breakdown's abstract yet character-illuminating tattoos; The Grandmaster's beautifying knack for period work, especially in regards to the always-gorgeous Tony Leung; Berberian Sound Studio's sumptuous gothic overtones; and A Hijacking's juxtaposition of weary, bureaucratic guises and increasingly decomposing maritime men.