When best isn't enough. (Viewpoint: film).

In Hollywood, Happy New Year brings happy anticipation as a slew of awards competitions and ceremonies begin leading to the big one, the Oscars in March. This year, a new awards ceremony will be slipped in amongst the venerable Golden Globes, AFI (American Film Institute), New York Film Critics, BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) and others: the first annual Visual Effects Society Awards.

Does the world need another competition? I can't speak for the world, but I think it's great ... and about time. Great that there is now a venue in which the practitioners of the craft can evaluate and honor the best work of their peers. And about time that the process of making an effect can help voters evaluate the work.

Ironically, although the category is called "visual" effects, these days, you often can't see whether a scene in a film has effects in it or not. Who can tell? "Visual effects people are paid to hide their work," says Tom Atkin, founder and executive director of the 800-member Visual Effects Society. "The better they hide an effect, the better it is." And if you can't tell, how can you judge? For Atkin, this conundrum was brought into clear focus during an Academy Awards Visual Effects "bake-off" two years ago.

During a bake off, potential Oscar nominees can show 15 minutes of excerpts from their film and are allowed five minutes for questions and answers. That's it. Although studios can send written materials to Visual Effects Branch members prior to the bakeoff, no "making of" footage is allowed before or during the nomination process. Branch members vote right after the last presentation, and their three nominees--that is, the nominated films--go to the 6000-plus members of the Academy who vote on Oscar winners for all the categories.

"After John Nelson did the presentation for Gladiator," Atkin remembers, "the first or second question was whether the tigers in the coliseum were real or CG. The Branch is a very exclusive club. If its members couldn't distinguish between CG and real, then I knew a lot of other people couldn't either. It made us realize that it was important to have VES awards."

The first VES nominations will be announced on January 13, with the winners announced at a gala ceremony in February. During this process, nominees will be able to show "before and afters" and "making of" footage. "You don't always get a full presentation at the bake-off, so it's nice the industry has this chance to spend more time on specifically what we do," says Craig Hayes, a partner in Tippett Studios. But that's not the only thing that distinguishes this awards competition.

Although VES is not the first organization to have visual effects peers picking winners--for example, the branch rather than the membership at large selects BAFTA's visual effects award--VES has taken the idea of visual effects awards further than any other organization.