The ‘Godzilla Minus One’ Team Reacting To Their Visual Effects Oscar Nomination Is Just Beautiful

Did you know a Godzilla movie had never been Oscar-nominated before Tuesday? Not even the good one from 2014 scored one for its visual effects. Japan’s most famous rampaging giant lizard who’s also a metaphor for the destruction wrought by America’s nuclear weapons turns 70 this year, but till now major awards bodies haven’t felt like fêting such amazements as his weirdly cute son and the infamous smog monster. That all changed thanks to the new, fairly serious Japanese installment Godzilla Minus One. And boy is it lovely seeing that film’s makers celebrate.

Per The Daily Beast, a viral video posted to social media shows some of the film’s team crowded into a conference room, watching the telecast of this year’s nominees being announced. Sure enough, the category for Best Visual Effects featured Japan’s new Godzilla effort, alongside The Creator, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Napoleon, and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One. (Incidentally the latter was that franchise’s first Oscar nomination, too.)

Not only does the titular beastie in Godzilla Minus One — which has been a surprise hit even here, a nation that has long deplored watching movies with subtitles — have genuinely impressive CGI. The film about him is a genuinely good movie, too. The very first Godzilla picture, from 1954, is not the campy affair that would soon follow. It’s a grim, intense affair, depicting the horrors that parts of the nation underwent during the war, and not only when America was dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Minus One begins just after World War II, and when Godzilla rampages across cities, it’s hair-raising and upsetting, not silly and rah-rah.

So mazel tov to the visual effects artists who handed Godzilla his first taste of AMPAS love. Maybe this will get people to watch the even better 2016 outing Shin Godzilla.

(Via The Daily Beast)