With the ongoing decline in production and theatre attendance, as well as the mounting threats from streamers and AI, 2025 was another trying year for the movie business. But Hollywood has always been resilient, the 98th Academy Awards are almost here, the nominations are in and despite all the challenges, last year turned out to be a great year for movies. Case in point? The huge box-office smash Sinners, which racked up a record-breaking 16 nominations, including for Best Picture and Best Director.
Yes, Hollywood is still awash in sequels, but it’s notable that Ryan Coogler’s original and entertaining vampire horror/thriller left them all in the dust. Even such heavyweight sequels as Avatar: Fire and Ash and Jurassic World: Rebirth only managed three nominations between them, and while last year’s blockbuster Wicked earned ten nominations, this year’s Wicked: For Good sequel and the superhero films scored zero. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another was close behind with 13 nominations, including ones for Best Picture and Best Director, and other Best Picture nods went to such diverse films as Hamnet, F1, Frankenstein, Bugonia, Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value, Train Dreams and The Secret Agent.
It’s also notable that while streaming giant Netflix, which has rocked the Hollywood ecosystem with its latest $80-billion-plus all-cash bid to buy Warner Bros., earned 18 nominations, including nine for Frankenstein and four for Train Dreams. That score was matched by tiny indie Neon for its acclaimed foreign language films Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent.
With all that in mind, we now present our annual look at some of the nominees.
Sinners
BEST PICTURE/ BEST DIRECTOR
At press time the leading contenders for the top awards have gradually solidified their positions; Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another still looks like the one to beat in both categories, but Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is close behind thanks to its record-busting 16-nomination haul. And if Coogler also ends up winning Best Director, he will become the first ever black filmmaker to win the Oscar in that category — a truly historic achievement after nearly 100 years of Academy Awards. Close behind them are Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value.
One Battle After Another “is the first film I’ve made in a long time that is contemporary, and that’s very freeing,” says Anderson. “It was a lot of fun because we could kind of go wild and just shoot what we wanted to shoot when we wanted to shoot it.”
That included shooting in real locations, and allowing the cast to do many of their own stunts. While the film does use visual effects, they were mostly used for de-aging Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn for the prologue. There was no green-screen work, and all the car chase scenes were real and done practically, either using a camera car or by attaching the camera to the side of the car. In terms of post challenges, One Battle After Another was more like “One Format After Another,” notes longtime Anderson editor Andy Jurgensen, who is also Oscar nominated for his work on the film.
“The film was shot with a combination of VistaVision and Super 35, mainly because the vintage VistaVision cameras were often temperamental,” he reports, “and each shoot day, the 35mm film negative was sent to FotoKem for processing and scanning.”
Jurgensen edited the film using Avid Media Composer 2024 on a Mac Studio Pro with an external 48TB G-RAID Thunderbolt 3 array.
Assistant editors Jay Trautman and Colleen Murphy worked off Avid NEXIS shared storage. Once reels were locked, Trautman exported cut lists for film assistant editors Andrew Blustain and Tom Foligno, who conformed the VistaVision and Super 35 work prints along with VFX film outs. The VistaVision answer print was timed at FotoKem, which completed an optical blow-up to 70mm. EDLs were delivered to Roundabout Entertainment for digital conforming for the IMAX, Dolby Vision and DCP releases.
F1 The Movie
I was chatting with Ryan Coogler recently about his ambitious genre mash-up horror/thriller, his love of post, and the technical and creative challenges facing him and his key behind-the-camera collaborators, including VFX supervisor Michael Ralla and editor Michael P. Shawver, both of whom are also Oscar nominated. The director knew that it would need “a lot of visual effects” because of star Michael B. Jordan playing dual roles as twin brothers.
“That was the big challenge, and it took a lot of work to figure it all out,” he notes. “And then, although it’s set in the Mississippi Delta, we ended up shooting in Louisiana because of the tax credits and local infrastructure.”
The film was shot by his Black Panther franchise director of photography Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who is also Oscar nominated for her work on Sinners, and the team shot with two very different camera systems — the Ultra Panavision 70mm and IMAX 65mm.
“That combination was the first time in history that a film was done like that,” he told me. It also made Arkapaw the first woman in the industry to shoot a feature film on 65mm IMAX. Coogler posted on the Warner Bros. lot and his sound department, based at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, came down for all the mixes on the lot, including temp mixes for the test screenings.
“We even built a mini screening room so we could put the film up on a 4K projection when we were checking our finals,” he adds. “That was a big project that Tina Anderson, our post production supervisor, and Michael Ralla organized, and it was really effective.”
Oscar winner Chloe Zhao’s new film, Hamnet, was shot on-location in Wales and England, with the interiors shot on soundstages at Elstree Studios outside London. Harbor UK provided DNxSQ dailies, utilizing a LUT created with DP Łukasz Żal. After production, editor Affonso Goncalves and the editorial team moved to the Gravity House post facility in Soho and worked locally on shared NEXIS storage.
“I don’t ever edit during the shoot,” says Zhao, “and I always do the first pass. After that, Affonso comes in and we talk a lot about the edit, and it’s a very close collaboration from then on. I love post, especially the edit.”
Visual effects were done by One of Us UK. The final DI was completed at Harbor with colorist Damien Vandercruyssen working alongside Zhao and Żal. Because of scheduling changes, the team finished both sound and picture deliverables in Los Angeles after wrapping up the majority of final post in the UK. The film was mastered in all traditional outputs, as well as Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos.
Marty Supreme
Set in 1952, Marty Supreme stars Academy Award nominee Timothée Chalamet in a kinetic portrait of a fast-talking New Yorker determined to turn the overlooked sport of table tennis into his personal springboard to glory.
“Marty is the quintessential dreamer, in that he’s the ultimate romantic and the most relentless optimist,” says writer/director Josh Safdie, who co-wrote the feature with his longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein, who also edited the film and is nominated for his work. Two-time Academy Award nominee Darius Khondji, reuniting with Safdie after collaborating on Uncut Gems, shot Marty Supreme on 35mm using Arriflex cameras and vintage anamorphic lenses. For the film’s tense table-tennis matches, Khondji used multiple cameras and wide-angle lenses to capture the game’s high-speed back-and-forth.
“We don’t watch any dailies during production,” notes Safdie. “We enter the edit, and now the director and the writers are morons. I hate them. Ronnie hates them too. And I hate the director, obviously.”
Danish/Norwegian writer/director Joachim Trier’s family drama Sentimental Value had its world premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix. It was then selected as the Norwegian entry for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars, and nominated for Best Picture and Best Director. Trier’s creative team included his longtime collaborators DP Kaspar Tuxen, who shot on 35mm, as usual, editor Olivier Bugge Coutté (who’s also nominated) and colorist Julien Alary. Cinelab in London did the 35mm film processing and scanning, and post was done at Storyline Studios in Oslo.
“I always use them for everything from editing to sound and VFX, and I love post,” says Trier. “My editor is a key collaborator on all my films, and balancing character development with so many characters was really interesting but tricky on this film.”
Other films in the Best Picture race — F1, Frankenstein, Bugonia, Train Dreams and The Secret Agent — look like long shots, but Academy voters can be unpredictable. Directed by Clint Bentley, Train Dreams, like last year’s winner Anora, may end up surprising everyone. Starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones, the lyrical period drama tells the story of logger Robert Grainier, a devoted family man who finds himself separated from his wife Gladys (Jones) and daughter as he works largely in isolation with the railroad to open up the untamed West in 1920s America. It premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it was snapped up by Netflix for a reported $16 million, and it was shot by Brazilian-born cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, who shot the 2021 Sundance hit drama Jockey, also directed by Bentley.
The Secret Agent
The film was shot almost entirely on-location in Washington, largely near the Canadian border and around Seattle, and Bentley and Veloso decided to shoot with the Arri Alexa 35.
“When we knew that we were going to shoot digital, that was the only option for me,” says the DP. “Because of its dynamic range, we could use natural light, real fire and candles.”
Veloso didn’t work on a LUT with a colorist.
“I usually just go with the regular LUT, then later in post, when we’re grading, I feel it gives a general sense of how colors really behave. And I’m always trying to keep that and bring more texture and make it more interesting.”
The shoot “was very hard, as it was a really tight schedule,” he reports.
“We had just six weeks for a period movie with a lot of scenes, plus a lot of big action scenes with stunts, extras and choreography. And we were moving a lot and shooting in so many different and remote places that took a long time to get to. Clint was reworking the script the whole time to see what he could cut or rearrange, so we could shoot faster.”
The hardest scenes to shoot were the two big fire scenes, he reports.
“The first is a huge fire in the forest seen from Grainier’s perspective, and of course we couldn’t burn a real forest, so it took amazing work by the lighting department and the SFX departments to make it look real. And then in post we added some VFX.”
For the second big fire sequence seen through Gladys’ perspective, the team shot on a volume stage in Seattle, “because of what we wanted to do with the shutter speed to get that dream-like quality,” Veloso explains.
Sentimental Value
Grading was done at Bleach in Sao Paulo with colorist Sergio Pasqualino, the DP’s longtime collaborator from Brazil.
“We’ve been working together for years,” Veloso, shares. “He also did Jockey, and he does an amazing job in the DI of just bringing texture and finding the right levels and bringing colors, but without manipulating it in a way where everything feels manipulated or painted. It’s just natural.”
The Secret Agent is another small film that’s been getting a lot of Oscar buzz. Helmed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, who won Best Director at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival where it premiered, it’s both a love letter to cinema and a subversive genre thriller. Set in Recife, Brazil, in 1977, it tells the story of Marcelo, a technology researcher who suddenly finds himself an unwitting target in the brutal dictatorship’s political purge.
“We did post in France, Holland and Germany,” Filho told me. “We did the sound mix and most of the VFX in France, the stop-motion animation and music in Holland, and the grade in Germany, so it was a true international co-production.”
Filho and cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova set out to create a visual style that blends vivid energy with the darkness of its political backdrop.
“The goosebumps that you get are from witnessing the acts of violence in the plain sunlight, or how the illustrations of a corrupt regime are accompanied by the rhythm of samba,” notes Alexandrova, who used bright and vibrant colors, along with energetic camera movements.
She shot with the Arri Alexa 35 and worked with colorist Dirk Meier on a LUT to create both the raw energy and lush brilliance of the film’s visuals.
“We wanted to create an analog look without pretending to have shot on film,” says Alexandrova. The team used vintage anamorphic Panavision lenses, zooms and split diopter shots.”
To capture the anarchy of Carnival in a pivotal scene where Marcelo learns of the serious danger he is in, the team planned out a carefully-choreographed sequence that involved over 200 people on the street as Marcelo walks out of a movie and joins the frenzied celebration.
“The whole scene was shot in one 15-minute take with the camera I operated, starting inside the cinema, dolly-riding out with the character, and then moving up high above the crowd,” Alexandrova shares.
Frankenstein
VISUAL EFFECTS & POST WORKFLOW
The VFX category boasts a very diverse and strong field — Avatar: Fire and Ash, F1, Sinners, Jurassic World: Rebirth and The Lost Bus, with the third film in the epic Avatar franchise looking like the one to beat. The sci-fi epic adventure is stuffed full of awesome VFX, and to create the immersive battles and dazzling aerial & underwater sequences, James Cameron reunited with Weta’s VFX super Joe Letteri, whose work on Avatar won him the Oscar, and two-time Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor/virtual second-unit director Richard Baneham. ILM also did some VFX.
The film has “over 3,500 VFX shots,” Cameron says. “I try to pack the frame, so the lighting, the cinematography, the selective depth of field, selective focus and everything in it is orchestrated so that there’s a beautiful flow from cut to cut in the action. The VFX process went very smoothly as we’ve worked together for a long time. Most of the Weta people working at the supervisory level were on Avatar 1 and 2, while at ILM, I worked with a relatively new team this time, but they did a great job. They were coming up to speed on the characters of Jake, Quaritch and Neytiri, for example, and I figured it was safe to hand them characters that we had a good legacy amount of data on. We could give them a lot of the previous shots and let them unpack it, study it and figure out their own unique workflow. And that worked out well, as you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the Weta and ILM character scenes.”
Asked if there were any surprises in the VFX process, Cameron reports that, “it was continuity for all the wounds, bruises, blood and so on that you’d have worked out with makeup continuity if you were shooting live-action. For some reason, this is a blind spot in VFX, and it turns out to be a big deal, and so we had to actually go back, either with the actors or with human models, and paint them blue, and put on the ash or the blood, or whatever, and photograph it, and have them move around, hit different lighting, and then scan all that stuff and put it into the renders.”
Avatar: Fire and Ash
What was the hardest visual effects sequence to get right?
“All of them,” he says. “We hovered between really hard and impossible every single day on every shot because we refused to let our guard down on photoreality. Now, within that, anything with water and fire — which means anything with fluid dynamics — is hard. I think water’s more difficult than fire any day, and I wouldn’t say we struggle with it, but it’s not automated. We have a great suite of simulation tools, and we’ve got a great sim team, but it still requires highly-observant humans in the loop to look at it and say, ‘Alright, it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.’”
If any film can give Avatar: Fire and Ash a run for its money, it’ll probably be F1 and its nominees — Ryan Tudhope, Nicolas Chevallier, Robert Harrington and Keith Dawson. The visual effects were supervised by Tudhope and split between Framestore, which had a team in London and a team in Montreal, and Industrial Light & Magic, which did the Daytona sequence. Tudhope, previously a key collaborator with director Joseph Kosinski on Top Gun: Maverick, adapted that film’s groundbreaking digital jet-reskinning techniques to the race cars of Formula One.
Train Dreams
“That was the key to shooting F1,” explains Kosinski. “The first thing I did was get Formula One to give me :30 of a race at Silverstone in their most uncompressed format. It was a ProRes file of about :30, five shots, and with my digital designer, Daniel Simon, we designed a new kind of made-up team and gave that digital model to Framestore. And we tried the technique out by re-skinning Lewis Hamilton’s car in the race with our fictional APXGP car, and we left Lewis in the driver’s seat in that footage. And that was our proof of concept. And once that was finished, I showed it to Formula One, to Lewis, and they were all blown away by how realistic it was. So that proved the technique would work, and it was something that we employed heavily throughout the film, both in footage that we shot ourselves, our onboard footage shot with the actors, but also in footage that we captured at the camera level during the races right off the broadcast cameras.
“We installed decks that captured uncompressed right off the chip, giving us a super high-quality 4K image from their live events. And piecing that together in editorial was a massive challenge, and then marking up which car had to be which was a huge challenge as well. But ultimately, when you see the finished product, hopefully as a viewer, you’re not aware of what we shot, what’s real racing, what’s staged racing, and which car is real and which one isn’t.”
One Battle After Another
Kosinski reports that the most difficult visual effects to do in the whole film were two shots that each took about a year to complete.
“The first one is a big aerial shot that introduces Silverstone and flies in and pushes all the way into a closeup on Joshua. That shot feels like one shot, but it’s actually a stitch of two or three elements, to make that seamless. It just took a lot of fine tuning and stabilizing and massaging to make that work.
“The other one was the big accident, when Brad Pitt’s character goes into the fence at Las Vegas. During the SAG strike, I couldn’t shoot with my SAG actors, but that’s a track that only exists three nights out of the year. So, in 2023 I went to the track during the race, and in one of those 10-minute windows I had access, I shot the plates for that accident, and then we spent about a year working on the physics simulation and rendering of that one shot, and we worked on it all the way up to the release deadline.”
The very first scene in Sinners, where the twin brothers share a cigarette, was crucial in creating the twinning illusion, and VFX supervisor Michael Ralla and VFX producer James Alexander explored every possible method on how to do the twinning.
“We went to a bunch of different companies, including Lola and Scanline, and we explored traditional face replacements, volumetric capture and AI face swaps,” says Ralla. “But with 65mm IMAX film, a lot of the AI-based approaches were simply not good enough, as the resolution wasn’t holding up. That would have been the easiest route to go.”
The Lost Bus
Instead, they went for a head-replacement approach, and developed a special ‘halo rig,’ a circular shoulder harness that had 12 cameras in total around Michael B. Jordan’s head that recorded data of his performance as he shot each take. Then they built a whole workflow around that with Rising Sun Pictures, which gave them a full head replacement. Ultimately, the process included shooting with body doubles as well, “and it was a massive coordination effort between sound and camera effects and VFX effects,” Ralla notes.
Storm did all the complex split-screen work, and the surreal montage, and for all the driving and hundreds of cotton field shots they used Base Effects in China. ILM in Vancouver did the train station scenes, and French company Light Effects did all the foreshadowing and premonition scenes. The team also had an in-house VFX team, “so it was this massive effort from all the different VFX vendors involved,” Ralla sums up.
And the winner is…. stay tuned.