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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.

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