How the Best VFX Oscar Predicted 'Star Wars'

With the Oscars fast approaching, there’s a lot of reflection on the history of cinema going up. Some of our favorite work has come from YouTube channel Burger Fiction, which recently compiled a pretty sweet compilation video of all the Best Picture nominees. The Burger folks have now set their sights on a video that assembles all of the best VFX Winners in Academy history.

What’s the takeaway from all this? Well, the earliest films really love a good aerial dogfight, or planes doing just about anything else because planes are crazy great to watch. There’s also some boat stuff, or as we call them, Planes of the Sea. There’s a small smattering of time period epics throughout, but very little of what we’d consider traditional “Oscar Bait” material — which really makes Forrest Gump’s inclusion stand out.

Space stuff is an almost constant inclusion, with most of the recent awards going to your Interstellar and Gravity type of film, even though this stretches all the way back to the beginning. It’s bizarre to see 2001: A Space Odyssey take home an award the year before Marooned, which is a far less pretty film, and that feels like a step back? Think of how beautiful 2001 is, and then look at this still for Marooned:

Anyway, there’s the period stuff, the dogfighting stuff, the space stuff, and then everything else is war. War all of the time. Whether storming the beaches of Normandy or just a bunch of burning buildings crashing around the main character, war never changes.

That’s why it almost laughably obvious when we hit Star Wars: A New Hope in the reel. It feels like the combination of every single movie that has won the category before. I almost said except for Blithe Spirit, but those ghosts look exactly like Jedi ghosts so, like, yeah that too.

Take a watch here and tell me if it seems as obvious to you:

Also, make sure to check out some of these other great videos from the channel. The punching one makes me happy.