At first glance, American Hustle, which is up for 10 Academy Awards Sunday night, doesn’t seem like a poster child for computer-generated imagery (CGI) or special effects. There are no free-floating astronauts or meteor-torn space telescopes — but you’d be surprised. For one thing, it depicted New York and other locales circa the late 1970s, early 1980s. In case you weren’t around at that time, things have changed in the past 35 years. A lot.

“We actually had over 600 visual effects in the film, much of it was about making visible things invisible,” said Sean Devereaux, visual effects supervisor for American Hustle and for Zero vfx, the Boston special effects company charged with making 2013 Boston look like New York 35 years ago; converting a Worcester set into Studio 54; erasing the all-too-visible scaffolding over New York’s Plaza Hotel, and making modern vehicles disappear from the streets.

Solving the…