Twenty six men received plaques, certificates and statuette on a stage adorned with four large Oscar statues, and it was mostly rare brush with Hollywood glitz for these men.

Steve LaVietes, a backend pipeline architect at Sony Pictures Imageworks, said he often had to "dispel the misconceptions of friends and family members about our glamorous lifestyle. Mostly because we sit in the dark typing and drawing diagrams on whiteboards."

"Just for tonight we can let that slide because what's more glamorous than the crew of the Starship Enterprise?" he said.

The award recognized his work on Katana, software used in "The Amazing Spider-Man" and "Paranorman" that allows artists to make changes efficiently to large computer graphics scenes.

Richard Mall, of Avatar, Ironman, and Twilight fame, honored for creating the Matthews Max menace arm rig used to place lighting in hard-to-reach spots on sets, he thanked his parents and chocked up. "I kind of just built something in my garage," Mall said. "I'm a little nervous because as a key grip for 36 years, if I see a camera in front of me, I'm in the wrong place."

Visual effects supervisor and director of photography Bill Taylor  was honored with John A. Bonner Medal of Commendation, noted that the green- and blue-screen pioneer Petro Vlahos, a two-time Oscar winner, was near death.

"He created the whole of composite photography as we know it at this time," Taylor said of Vlahos, who he described as a mentor. "Whenever you see Mary Poppins dancing with penguins, when you see Pi in a boat in the middle of the ocean, you are seeing, Vlahos' genius at work."

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