Avatar Dominates At VES Awards – Trek Vets Win For BSG

Sunday night was the prelim of award season leading up to next weekend’s Oscars. This time it was the Visual Effects Society where Star Trek was nominated for two awards. However, it came as no surprise that James Cameron’s Avatar dominated the evening, walking home with a big pile of awards, including one shared by Zoe Saldana. A couple of Trek vets also picked up awards for their work on BSG.

 

 

Avatar dominates VES Awards

The eighth annual VES Awards were held Sunday night at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. Star Trek was nominated in two of the feature film categories: Best Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture (Burt Dalton, Russell Earl, Roger Guyett, & Shari Hanson), and Best Matte Paintings (Brett Northcutt, Shane Roberts, Masahiko Tani, &Dan Wheaton). As expected, the effects artists from James Cameron’s Avatar triumphed in both of those categories.


"Star Trek" nominees Guyett and Dalton at VES Awards – walked away empty handed

Avatar went into the evening with a total of 11 VES nominations in 7 categories and walked away with 6 awards, losing only the Best Compositing category to District 9. Not only was Avatar the big winner, but Cameron was also honored with a VES Lifetime Achievement Award. One of the awards Avatar picked up was for Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Feature Motion Picture, which went to the team behind Neyteri, including Zoe Saldana for her acting.


Zoe Saldana shared one of Avatar’s six VES Awards

Two Star Trek veterans came away a winners for their TV work. David Morton and Gary Hutzel shared the Best Visual Effects in a Broadcast Series award (along with Michael Gibson and Jesse Toves) for their work on Battlestar Galactica ("Daybreak"). Morton worked on both Voyager and Enterprise, Hutzel worked on TNG and DS9.


Effects shot from BSG’s "Daybreak"

The complete list of nominees is available at THR.

Next Stop – The Oscars
The VES Awards were the last guild awards of the year (finally!). Award season hits its peak next weekend at the Academy Awards, where Star Trek is nominated for four awards.

Here is the award show scorecard, with a list of Star Trek nominations and the final result

Upcoming Award Shows


"Star Trek" effects are nominated for an Oscar

 

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Zoe’s ears weren’t blue! This is a disaster!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. TNG should make a mini-series… and they should use the BSG guys to do the effects.

“CALL ME JOE expanded version” wins again!

I kind of like the idea of Zoe being credited as part of a team animating a character; that’s a cool way to do it.

I was not a fan of Avatar, but I am glad to see BSG getting some recognition.

Seems the industry is having a tough time getting over the fact one of the best produced and entertaining films of last years was called “Star Trek” however. TO be fair, I guess it was a very competitive year, but I’ll take Star Trek redux over Dances with Wolves redux any day.

@5 “year” of course, not “years.”

“Avatar” deserves all of these wins.

It’s worth noting that a number of the folks who worked on Trek – Church, Clyne – also worked on “Avatar.”

#5 Agreed.
As much as I loved Trek’s fx, Avatar deserves everything it gets.

Avatar was a great movie from a technical/FX perspective, and deserves to sweep in those categories.

It also got the Science pretty much 99% right, from Physics to Biology and Geology and Astronomy.

I enjoyed Avatar, but my heart loves JJ’s Star Trek, and were it not for Avatar, it would be the most deserving in many categories.

I also loved District 9, which had some incredible effects, completely seemless, and completely in service of the story.

To my mind, they were too good, since most of the effects didn’t look like effects.

#9, “were it not for Avatar, it would be the most deserving in many categories.”

Such statements live only in the world of speculation. But as long as we are speculating (and remember you started it), I think the Academy and many other guild awards and shows would view Star Trek as more of the same old-shool Hollywood sfx movies, and District 9 would be getting its due.

Aside form the Trek zealots, I think most of us agree District 9 was a much better overall movie than either Avatar or Trek. If Avatar had not blown everyone away with its seamless integration of ground-breaking fx and story, District 9 would likely still be displacing Trek in most categories. And, that is not to say Star Trek would not be displaced by some other award-worthy film which some think have been “snubbed” (and there are quite a few).

I agree with future guy. A TNG mini-series to close out that storyline once and for all would be fantastic.

“I guess it was a very competitive year, but I’ll take Star Trek redux over Dances with Wolves redux any day.”

Well, if anyone gave me a choice between Dances with Wolves” or Top Gun, I know what I’d watch. . .

A TNG mini series would be nice. Another TNG movie would never happen, but Nemesis was just too damn open ended to let be, plus the ending, well it sucked. Will it happen? Doubtful, but us TNG people can always hope.

@9 and @10- Yeah, I agree, out of the three, District 9 really is the best movie.

But not my favorite ;)

Moon by Duncan Jones was better than all of these films.

#10: “Aside form the Trek zealots, I think most of us agree District 9 was a much better overall movie than either Avatar or Trek”

Indeed, and a lot of us groove on ‘Moon,’ and Watchmen, while hard to hug, was noteworthy as well …

And personally I don’t separate the 100% animated films from the 90% animated ones … Up, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and even Monsters vs. Aliens all ping on my “sci-fi I enjoyed from 2009” list.

I watched D9 on the widescreen with some friends with different likes and dislikes, and we all found it an oppressive bore. Awful pacing, and an end which could have come 20 minutes earlier.

@16- Ah! Moon. You know, regardless of how cold and slightly offended Avatar left me, this really was a good year for SF. How could I forget Moon? Indeed, I think I liked it more than District 9. Good raw science fiction for science fiction’s sake. Also agree on Watchmen- not easy to like, but remarkable, and more so on subsequent viewings.

Undoubtedlty the visual effects in Avatar are way ahead of anything else ever seen on screen but i’m still not entirely convinced by the animation of these CGI characters. It’s almost there. To me they don’t quite look real enough especially when they’re mouths are talking or when scenes cut from a fully CGI scene to a scene with real actors. The mouth movements aren’t quite there. I’m sure there are still some significant steps forward to be made in CGI character animation and I look forward to the day when CGI characters go comepletey unnoticed by an audience. (maybe even a CGI Data that would fool audiences into thinking they were watching Brent Spiner)

JJ Trek was the best Trek film since ST IV, and District 9 was my second favorite genre film this year.

Avatar was a technical accomplishment but left me cold, with its familiar plot of native versus ‘civilized’ man, and hackneyed score and dialogue/themes. A PS3 game on steriods is what it felt like to me, but I don’t begrudge anyone for liking it.

Avatar was a dire movie with a lot of talented people working on it; actors, technicians etc. The script was awful and the direction pedestrian. I didn’t think much of the production design either; there’s nothing wildly original about the “civilised” side; rather standard sci-fi stuff, while the forest with its silly disco-lighting flora just looked horribly fake. The less said about the movie’s simultaneously naive and misanthropic “message” the better. It’s disappointing that it’s winning awards.

Somebody could make a good movie about such a clash of interests and needs between civilisations, but Avatar wasn’t it. Come to that, Star Trek: Insurrection, which has a similar story, wasn’t it either.

“Aside form the Trek zealots, I think most of us agree District 9 was a much better overall movie than either Avatar or Trek.”

“Avatar” was best, and no other sf or fantasy movie this year deserves even to be nominated for “Best Picture.”

That said, I’ll be happy if “The Hurt Locker” wins, satisfied with “Inglourious Basterds” and estatic if it’s “Avatar.”

ha. i haven’t even seen avatar yet, and i probably never will.

but who really knows?

if you ask me, Star Trek is the best movie and will remain that way forever. too bad I’m only one person.

yay for Star Trek!

#22: “The less said about the movie’s simultaneously naive and misanthropic “message” the better.”

As near as I can tell, the fundamental message in Avatar is “don’t be so wrapped up in your own affairs that you stop seeing the world around you and the people around you,” reinforced by various things throughout the film … which is simple (perhaps even simplistic) but hardly naive or misanthropic (in fact, the social facet of the message is the opposite of misanthropy).

For the record, while I thought it rocked, it wouldn’t get my vote for Best Picture (though it’s definitely in my Top 10), but there’s nothing wrong with its message: See. It’s all about seeing.

#25

“don’t be so wrapped up in your own affairs that you stop seeing the world around you and the people around you,”

No, that’s not what it’s about. It’s hackneyed left-wing dogma about how western imperialists destroy Rousseauesque noble savages in our thirst for oil.

#26: “No, that’s not what it’s about.”

Yes, that’s what it’s about.

#26: “It’s hackneyed left-wing dogma about how western imperialists destroy Rousseauesque noble savages in our thirst for oil.”

A fair description of the plot … but not the message.

You can use critical theory to derive any message you like from a work. “Don’t be so wrapped up…” etc may be something you see in the movie, but that doesn’t make it the “message” of the movie.

True, true. But it’s not something I’m extrapolating; it’s something the film is pretty explicit about. I mean, I like the movie, but it’s not exactly subtle :)