They Shoot Oscar Prognosticators, Don't They?
Handicapping the “Below the Line” Races – Part Two
By J Don Birnam
February 5, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Best Production Design (aka Art Direction)
Perhaps the last of the “easy” technical categories this year is Best Art Direction or Production Design (coincidentally one of my favorite Oscar categories). These are, essentially, the people who design and oversee the construction of the sets that scenes are shot in, and are responsible for the artifacts, furniture, etc., that give ambiance to a picture. They also find and scout shooting locations.
Sadly, this year’s choices strike me as remarkably weak and perhaps the best example of a branch just sheepishly checking off Best Picture contenders. The sets in American Hustle are not at all memorable, as it has to be relatively simple to obtain 1970s artifacts from studios’ back lots in Hollywood. Nor was I particularly impressed by the set decoration of 12 Years a Slave, although I could see how some would respect the slave and plantation houses - the sort of woodwork that likely got Sweeney Todd its Best Art Direction Oscar. It does not get much better, in my opinion, with Her’s nomination for Best Production Design. I appreciate the branch’s respect for the more minimalist, futuristic work, but the sets were just not all that, in my view.
For the win it thus comes down to two entries - Gravity, once more, as the presumptive “technical awards” front-runner, versus the impressive and glamorous sets of The Great Gatsby. I confess some ignorance regarding the degree of difficulty of Gravity’s Art Direction - I suppose the space stations were singularly complex. My instinct, however, tells me that Gatsby has what it takes to pull it off over the presumptive technical front-runner, like Lincoln did last year over Life of Pi, or like Alice in Wonderland did before that over The King’s Speech. The reason is simple: it is the best designed of the bunch, and these last two victories demonstrate that the Academy is not afraid to award the Oscar to the more deserving as opposed to the most liked. Both the opulent interior and the façades of the Long Island mansions jump out more to the viewer than anything in Gravity. I thus predict that designer Catherine Martin, a previous winner in this category for Moulin Rouge!, will add another trophy to her collection.
Still, it is worth wondering why the branch did not find space for much more difficult and showy sets, like those in The Hobbit and its impressive scene inside the dwarf mountain; Catching Fire and the work done in the districts and the Hunger Games arena; or even the artful Elysium, where the contrasting sets are essentially a character in the story. The answer, I suspect, lies in the relatively weak awards season performance by those movies, and/or the fact that the Academy doesn't generally recognize big commercial blockbusters without an artsy gloss to them. Ultimately, however, it reflects poorly on the branch to simply pick Best Picture front runners because they like the movie, at the expense of better designed movies.
Best Costume Design
If there is one branch that can be counted on to deliver oddball choices outside of the mainstream Best Picture flicks, it is the costume designers’ branch, and this year is no exception. With nods for The Grandmaster, The Invisible Woman, and the Great Gatsby, the branch showed once more that they are not as beholden to sheep mentality as some of their peers are. Still, they could not resist themselves and had to let American Hustle and 12 Years a Slave slip in (both of which arguably are less deserving than the three other nominees), at the expense of my favorite costumes of the year - Catching Fire.
The presence of those two Best Picture front-runners and the “consolation prize” mentality thus make this a more difficult category to predict. The Grandmaster, arguably the most deserving here, is likely on the outside looking in simply because most have not seen that movie. Any other year I would easily predict The Invisible Woman - despite the costume branch’s best efforts, the Academy consistently returns to period pieces, rewarding Anna Karenina, The Young Victoria, and Elizabeth: The Golden Age in recent years. Still, in the last 20 years, only one movie has won Best Costumes when that prize was its only nomination, and that movie was the more widely seen Marie Antoinette. Thus, I think we can safely discard The Invisible Woman.
So we are down to the showier costumes of Gatsby, and two serious Best Picture contenders. Patricia Norris’s costume work in 12 Years a Slave has a chance if that movie wins Best Picture. Norris has been nominated six times, but ballots do not include an individual’s name in the “below the line” categories, so, like Roger Deakins in the Cinematography category, persistent snubs will not help her. But a last minute Best Picture rally could sweep Slave to a win here if the Academy is looking for somewhere else to reward it. Alternatively, some are predicting it as a consolation prize to Hustle if it is to be shut out of the major categories. Others still think that Catherine Martin, who designed Gatsby’s costumes as well as its sets, could walk away a double Oscar winner on March 2nd. This is certainly not unheard of, most recently with Alice in Wonderland, and Gatsby definitely has the more memorable and the closer-to-period-piece type costumes. Thus, as of right now, I expect Gatsby to take this, with Hustle close behind it, but this category remains in flux.
Best Original Score
We come now to my favorite technical category. To me, a movie’s score can be as important as its dialogue in many ways - it sets the tone, causes changes in pace, evokes emotion, or causes fear. How many memorable movies are remembered in part because of their unforgettable scores?
As we delve deeper into the technical races and find harder categories, I find the best results come from scratching off the two or three nominees that have no chance, and then select from the remaining candidates based on a combination of artistic merit and buzz for the movie. What this means in Best Original Song is that we can quickly eliminate two nominees, The Book Thief and Saving Mr. Banks, which earned their respective movie’s sole nomination in this category. It is a shame that these excellent film went under-appreciated by the Academy, but alas it likely means that they will walk away empty handed on Oscar night.
Like Costumes, I can see this Oscar going in all of three directions between the remaining contenders. My favorite of the three is Alexandre Desplat’s scoring of Philomena. Desplat, a five-time loser in this category, delivers a subtle yet touching score that correctly sets the temperature of the movie and is remarkably emotional. Philomena is likely helped by its support amongst the British contingency of the Academy, but hurt because it is not your typical epic-type score. It is thus likely in third place as of right now, but a consolation prize-type victory here is not out of the question yet.
This year’s Golden Globe for Best Original Score went to All Is Lost, which has a haunting, profound score that seamlessly moves the viewer through an otherwise essentially silent movie, and it is too bad that the Academy could not find space for it in this category. That film’s slot seems to have yielded to the scoring of Her and, again, I am left to wonder at the Academy’s seeming adoration of that movie. In any case, between Gravity and Her, I would prefer to see Gravity emerge victorious. The score in the closing scenes of the movie as Sandra Bullock’s character struggles for her life and as a meteor shower of debris descends on Earth is nothing short of hair-rising. Her’s score, in my view, was mostly muted and uninspiring. That said, the Academy has somehow shown a penchant for thinking outside the box and not always falling for traditional-type compositions, such as when they rewarded Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for The Social Network, or A.J. Rahman’s completely different work in Slumdog Millionaire.
But given the lack of recognition by other awards groups for Her’s score, I’m chalking this one up to Gravity for the time being. Again, stay tuned for changing winds in this race.
Best Sound Mixing & Best Sound Editing
Ah, the dreaded sound categories. Nightmares for most Oscar prognosticators because they represent two categories and few people (Academy members included) seem to understand what these categories mean. My simple explanation, given at almost every Oscar party every year, is that Sound Editing is the aural version of Best Visual Effects. (A rocket launcher probably did not actually go off in Lone Survivor, but the Sound Editor has to make you believe that it did by creating a sound effect.) The Sound Mixer’s job, by contrast, is remarkably harder, and is probably well-described as the sound version of Film Editor - he or she has to put together all of a movie’s sounds, including soundtrack, dialogue, ambient noise, and effects, and make sure they are clear and crisp.
Over the years, Oscarologists have developed a plethora of rules of the road to try to predict these perennially confounding races. As usual, most of them tend to have only a modicum of truth in them. Musicals, for example, do tend to do well in the Sound Mixing category, like Les Miserables did last year, because of the complexities of mixing lyrics (most of which are done by voice overs) with song and other sounds. “Loud” action movies tend to do well in Sound Editing, because of all the sound effects required to replicate explosions, gunshots, etc. Beyond that, however, it starts to get iffy. Sometimes you will hear people say that a movie nominated for only one category of the two stands no chance, but Les Miserables and Zero Dark Thirty did just that in their respective categories last year. Sometimes you will hear people say that it is best to mark off the same movie for both categories, but the awards do not always fall that way. Others suggest you split your predictions, so as to avoid scoring a goose egg across both fields and increase your chances of getting one right. Maybe, but I think this year the rule that will trump will be that the Best Picture frontrunner will take the cake.
Let’s start with Sound Editing (or Sound Effects as I like to call it). Although All is Lost and Captain Phillips are worthy nominees for their at-sea and, in the latter’s case, gunfire effects, All is Lost clearly fell flat with the Academy as it sadly landed its lone nomination in this category. Moreover, I believe the little steam that was left in Phillips may have been sapped from it when it failed to get expected Best Director and Best Actor nominees. It is clear that this movie has been slowing down and it is quite possible that it will go home empty-handed. As for The Hobbit, a clear trend has developed with these franchise movie nominations like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings series since Return of the King took home the gold in 2003 - the nomination is the reward.
So, once more, we are down to Gravity and another movie in a technical category - this time Lone Survivor has the unfortunate job of facing the revered technical marvel. In my view, Lone Survivor has the unequivocal better sound effects - helicopters, machine gun fire, rocket launchers, you name it. Gravity has impressive sound and may well win both categories if members aren’t really thinking before voting, but as we shall get to, I think Gravity’s strength lies in the sound mixing department. So, for now, I’m going to predict Lone Survivor here, but that prediction comes with ten thousand asterisks. I fully expect Gravity to win.
And here is why: a huge part of why Gravity is a good technical movie is because the sound and noises are told from Sandra Bullock’s perspective. Much is made of the fact that sound does not carry in space and so, for example, one cannot hear the debris shower approaching when it does - the sound mixer’s job in Gravity is thus nothing short of remarkable. They had to study what mediums are able to transmit sound in space, and then replicate that and record that along with the voice and music track. The soundtrack, moreover, was carefully orchestrated to emulate sounds you would expect to hear - such as explosions and reverberations - so as to not completely confuse the audience. Thus, Gravity’s sound mixing is arguably its second most impressive technical achievement and rightly deserves to win the mixing category, as I predict it will.
The other nominees in this category don’t stand a chance, in my view. The only one with an outside hope is Inside Llewyn Davis, the closest to a musical in this category, for its use of live singing by Oscar Isaacs. The nominations of Lone Survivor and Captain Phillips are perplexing and uninspiring, while The Hobbit’s is deserved but unlikely to yield an Oscar for the movie.
Best Film Editing
And last but certainly not least it has come down to this - the Best Picture of the technical categories. One would expect that given Gravity’s dominance of most of the other technical races it would handily win this award, but I am not convinced.
This year, the five nominees are the three Best Picture frontrunners, plus Dallas Buyers Club and Captain Phillips. Dallas is probably just happy to be there, but it is a somewhat surprising pick for such a “small” movie, to the expense of Thelma Schoonmaker, who edited the three-hour long Wolf of Wall Street. American Hustle is, in my view, the weakest of the remaining nominees. I simply see no degree of difficulty or particularly impressive dialogue cut scenes to justify the nomination, let alone the award. Although the filmmakers attempt to use editing in Hustle to create tension, it falls flat, in my opinion, and I just cannot see it winning here on Oscar night. If it does, however, then I would see it as a sign that its chances of Best Picture are high.
Gravity could also pull it off in a technical sweep and has masterful editing in its main action sequences. Unlike for Hustle, however, a win for Gravity would not necessarily mean it's set to win Best Picture, given that Gravity is strong in all technical categories. Still, based on merit, I would not go for Gravity for the win here.
Only if 12 Years a Slave wins this Oscar early in the night would I read something into the win - the movie seems to be one of the weakest in this category, and a win could signify strength within the Academy. But I don’t see that happening either, even if 12 Years does win the ultimate prize - the best choice for this category is too obvious for people to ignore.
Captain Phillips, arguably, is the best edited of the other four nominees, as its fast-paced action shots from different perspectives are a key to building tension and reaching the pivotal climax towards the movie’s end. Indeed, the last act of the movie is masterfully edited between the different players in the tension-filled stand-off between the Somali pirates and the U.S. forces. Although Captain Phillips’ increasingly slowing momentum could really hurt its chances here, this would not be a bad place for the Academy to award a sort of consolation prize to the movie. Thus, barring a Gravity full out sweep, I expect Phillips to win this Oscar by a nose.
Stay tuned for the next installment of “They Shoot Oscar Prognosticators, Don’t They?”, when I will take a look at some of the other film races, including Best Animated Feature Film, Best Foreign Language Film, and hopefully some of the shorts.