 |
| The recreation of the Berlin Wall in Bridge of Spies is one of the most impressive feats of production design this year. |
Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the
Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check
back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.
Best Production Design
The nominees are:
If the point of film is to transport us to other worlds,
which I believe it is, then the art directors, set decorators, and production designers
are the people who make those worlds feel real. They provide the texture and
life that allow us to get lost in places we never imagined finding ourselves.
They create the universes in which filmmakers set their stories and the spaces
in which actors explore their characters’ lives. Their job is to make the
artifice of film feel like reality for a couple hours.
It is probably for all those reasons the Academy has shown
disproportionate love to period and fantasy films over the years. It has been nearly
40 years since a contemporary drama won this category – All the President’s Men in 1976, primarily for its recreation of
the office of The Washington Post. This year, the only nominee that could even
be considered contemporary would be The
Martian, and it is a sci-fi film set in the future, so even if it were to
win, I think the streak stays alive. The rest of the nominees fit firmly within
the confines of the Academy’s wheelhouse.
Mad Max: Fury Road – From that jumping-off point, Mad Max: Fury Road is a fantasy, I
suppose, but in only the loosest sense of that word. George Miller’s twisted
post-apocalyptic actioner takes place in a true hellscape. Every element of
this film looks like it was created by demons, which is absolutely perfect for
the feeling Miller is trying to evoke. There are a lot of beautiful little
details in this film, but if we are being honest, what people remember are the
war rigs and other vehicles. They are fully operational marvels of design and
craftsmanship – and they look damn cool.
Production designer Colin Gibson, a first-time nominee with
few feature films to his credit, came up with the designs for most of the war
rigs, and he and his team brought his nightmarish ideas to life. Meanwhile, set
decorator Lisa Thompson, also a first-time nominee, populates each scene with
the kind of small touches that sell the truth of this hell.
Bridge of Spies – Moving from the creation of a whole new
reality to the recreation of an old one, Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies is a gorgeously realized
Cold War thriller that takes audience back in time to early 1960s Berlin. While
much of the film is wonderfully decorated – James Donovan’s home décor and the
Soviet offices are particularly impressive – the element that stands out most,
as I mentioned at length in my review, is the Berlin Wall. To watch the wall go
up in Spielberg’s film is to forget the last 50 years of history and be
transported to the moment when a world was literally and figuratively split in
two.
Adam Stockhausen, the film’s production designer, won his
first Academy Award just last year for Wes Anderson’s storybook The Grand Budapest Hotel, and he was
previously nominated two years ago for 12
Years a Slave. Meanwhile, these are the first nominations for set
decorators Rena DeAngelo and Bernhard Heinrich. DeAngelo did, however, win an
Emmy for production design for her work on the pilot episode of Mad Men, which evokes a similar early
‘60s feel, though with a clear emphasis on Americana.
The Danish Girl – A bit of a surprise nominee, though not
entirely unpredictable, director Tom Hooper’s Lili Elbe biopic may not have
caught on much with the Academy, but it is nothing if not beautifully rendered.
This is the second year in a row a film about the life of an artist has been
nominated in this category – after the excellent Mr. Turner last year – and with good reason. The controlled chaos
of an artist’s workspace is not easy to capture, while the extravagant
interiors of the high-class art world are an equally difficult challenge to
master.
Production designer Eve Stewart has two previous nominations
for wildly different work – the ornate designs of Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy and the understated reserve
of Hooper’s The King’s Speech.
Michael Standish on the other hand has been set decorator on just three feature
films, though his work on last year’s Victor
Frankenstein stands out despite that film’s critical and commercial
failure. Stewart and Standish’s work on The
Danish Girl is admirable, but they are up against four Best Picture
nominees in this category, which means they are probably the least likely
winners.
The Revenant – It is easy to get lost in the gorgeous, natural
exteriors of The Revenant, but the
production design team is as responsible for the beauty of the film’s world as
Mother Nature. The work particularly shines in the varied designs of the camps
of the many disparate groups trudging through the wilderness such as the
French-Canadian fur trappers, the various native tribes, and Hugh Glass’ roaming
campsite. In addition, Fort Kiowa, the destination for every major character in
the film, is a tremendous feat of design and art direction, appearing as a
sanctuary of human establishment amid the bleak and unforgiving wild.
Production designer Jack Fisk, a previous nominee for Paul
Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood,
has worked extensively with director Terrence Malick. Indeed, his work on
Malick’s The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, and in particular The New World feels of a piece with
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s very Malick-like meditation on the natural world
and man’s place in it. Set decorator Hamish Purdy has spent most of his career
as an assistant on big-budget blockbusters, but he finds the right level of restraint
and detailing to fit perfectly into the world of The Revenant.
The Martian – I complained last year that the Academy sometimes
is inexplicably wowed by sci-fi films that recreate the complex inner workings
of spaceships. Specifically, nominations in consecutive years for Gravity and Interstellar felt unwarranted. I stand by those complaints, but
Ridley Scott’s The Martian is a
different story. Yes, it also features a number of sequences aboard
semi-futuristic spaceships, but its real standout work is in the Martian
basecamp and the NASA headquarters, which each take elements familiar to us and
make them fresh and interesting.
Arthur Max is a three-time nominee who has worked almost exclusively
as a production designer for Scott the past 15 years. As much as Scott has
hopped across genres, Max has followed him there with wonderfully varied work
on films as disparate as Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, American Gangster, and Prometheus.
Set decorator Celia Bobak, a previous nominee for the musical adaptation The Phantom of the Opera, has not worked
in the sci-fi genre before, which probably works to her advantage in making us
feel like The Martian is not set very
far outside our own reality.
The final analysis
The Art Directors Guild, the only real precursor for this
category apart from the BAFTA Awards later this month, hand out three feature
awards – fantasy, period, and contemporary. The winners this year were Mad Max: Fury Road for fantasy, The Revenant for period, and The Martian for contemporary. Bridge of Spies and The Danish Girl were also nominees for period. If we narrow the
field to just the three winners, it seems probable the Academy will be drawn to
the ostentatiousness of Mad Max: Fury
Road, giving that film the slight edge here.
Will win: Mad
Max: Fury Road
Should win: Mad
Max: Fury Road
Should have been
here: Ex Machina
Tomorrow: Best Costume
Design
No comments:
Post a Comment