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| Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie, nominated for Best Costume Design. |
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 leading up to the ceremony for
analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories and more.
Best Costume Design
The nominees are:
Allied
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Florence Foster Jenkins
Jackie
La La Land
An interesting divergence has taken place in this category
the last 10 or so years. From 1996-2003, six of the eight winners in this
category also won Best Picture. Since then, only one of 12 has taken home both
awards, The Artist in 2011. What’s
more, the eventual Best Picture winner has earned a nomination in only two of
those 12 years with The King’s Speech
in 2010 joining The Artist on that
list.
It poses the question: What has caused this shift? The
answer seems to be the Academy started in 2004 rewarding a different type of
film for Best Picture. Instead of big, costume epics like Shakespeare in Love, Gladiator,
and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of
the King, smaller, more intimate human dramas such as Million Dollar Baby, Crash,
and The Hurt Locker started winning
the top prize. Great films all, but hard to site for their costume work.
How this shift took place is harder to say and probably a
question for another day. The point as it pertains to today’s column is Costume
Design has become something of a wild card at the Oscars. The Academy’s fickle
tastes have taken it everywhere from Wonderland to 1920s Hollywood to
post-apocalyptic Australia. You just do not know what is going to happen,
except in a year like this, when you think you do.
La La Land – La La Land
joins a long list of musicals to find favor in this category – just in the past
few years, Into the Woods, Les Miserables, and Nine, among others – but it is a rare bird in that its plumage is
contemporary. We talked a lot yesterday about anti-contemporary bias in
Production Design, but it is nearly as bad in the Costume Design category. However,
La La Land engenders such love it
makes one overlook such issues.
Costume designer Mary Zophres could just as easily and
probably ought to have been a double nominee for this and her remarkable work
on Joel and Ethan Coen’s Hail, Caesar!.
Zophres has worked with the Coens since 1996, when she designed the costumes
for Fargo, and she earned her only
previous nomination for their True Grit
in 2010. Her designs here are a classic movie musical look – repeating
patterns, color for character, and a generally light, breezy Southern
California chic, all the better for dancing. She is perfectly keyed in to
writer-director Damien Chazelle’s aesthetic, and her work seamlessly
contributes to the film’s effortless flow.
Jackie – Jacqueline Kennedy is the kind of character that sucks
all the air out of a room. Her presence alone demands attention. She is, of
course, the center of attention in this eponymous film. What becomes
interesting in watching Jackie, which
concerns mostly the days surrounding John F. Kennedy’s assassination, is how
impossible it is to change one’s aura. Even mired in the worst tragedy of her
life, Jackie Kennedy cannot help but embody the Jacqueline Kennedy image.
Among everything else she was, she was a style icon, and
that is not lost on the filmmakers, including necessarily costume designer
Madeline Fontaine. This is Fontaine’s first Oscar nomination, though she is highly
regarded in France, where she has been nominated for eight Caesar Awards (the
French Oscars) and won two. She does not shy away from the Jacqueline Kennedy
iconography and plays instead on everything we think we know about the First
Lady. An interesting side note: One of Fontaine’s earliest gigs as costume
designer was for a little-seen French film called Kennedy et Moi, which tells of a French writer who becomes obsessed
with John F. Kennedy.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – One place where this
spinoff film has a leg up on its parent franchise, at least in terms of
potential Oscar recognition here, is in its setting. While the Harry Potter series is set in a magical
version of our world, the contemporary styles sported by most of the leads did
little to distinguish their characters. Only the first film in the franchise, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Philosopher’s Stone for my non-American
friends), garnered recognition for its costumes. On the other hand, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
benefits from its 1920s New York City setting, giving the costume department
lots of room to play and experiment.
It also helps to have costume designer extraordinaire
Colleen Atwood on your side. Atwood has 12 Academy Award nominations to her
name, and she has won three times, for Chicago,
Memoirs of a Geisha, and Alice in Wonderland. A legend in the
industry and beloved by her peers, Atwood can never be counted out for a win,
and her work here blending the drab realities of 1920s New York with the
magical alternate reality certainly is deserving.
Florence Foster Jenkins – It is undeniable Meryl Streep goes
through a lot of costume changes in this movie. The high-society music maven
loved her outlandish clothes as much as she loved to sing, and her
self-confident flamboyance in both arenas would be difficult to match. Ms.
Jenkins did nothing small, and her fashions were no different. The sheer volume
of costumes in this film makes it an easy play for the Academy, featuring in
addition to the dozens of Streep wardrobes, numerous scenes of halls packed with
music patrons all dressed to the nines in the fashions of the day (mid-1940s).
Nominated costume designer Consolata Boyle has developed
something of a specialty designing for strong, steadfast, older women. Her one
previous nomination came for The Queen,
which she followed later with The Iron
Lady, Philomena, and Florence Foster Jenkins. Next on the
docket is Victoria and Abdul,
featuring Judi Dench as Queen Victoria, so you know, well on brand. Boyle’s
work here is, as ever, solid, but it suffers from comparison to the more
nuanced, thematically rich designs of its fellow nominees.
Allied – As classic a nominee as you will find in
this category this year, Robert Zemeckis’ World War II spy thriller is a
throwback in every way. It is shooting for Casablanca-style
romantic grandeur, and while its charismatic leads (Brad Pitt and Marion
Cotillard) do a lot of heavy lifting, they cannot make up for the film’s flimsy
plot and unearned drama. Whatever story failures the film has, though, Zemeckis
is nothing if not an expert world builder when it comes to crafts, bringing on
some of the best in the business to design his universes.
Costume designer Joanna Johnston is
one of his most frequent collaborators, and for folks of a certain age, she is
a designer of dreams. The self-tying Nikes and self-adjusting jacket in Back to the Future Part II? Johnston. The
pulpy noir threads of Who Framed Roger
Rabbit? Johnston. Forrest Gump’s iconic white suit? Johnston. She also took
a turn at Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones
and the Last Crusade and helped Steven Spielberg storm Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan.
Remarkably, she has been nominated
only once before, for Spielberg’s Lincoln.
Her designs for Allied are sleek,
memorable, and instantly recognizable within the film’s aesthetic, simultaneously
calling out for attention and blending back into the narrative.
The final analysis
I made the mistake last year of believing the flashiest work
would win out over the crafts juggernaut. If a film has momentum, that is all
it really takes to overcome whatever preconceived notions or biases the Academy
may have. That means while something like Allied
or Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find
Them could and likely would win this category in another year, you cannot
stop a moving train. La La Land is that
train, and it will scoop this award up along the tracks.
Will win: La La
Land
Should win:
Jackie:
Should have been
here: The Dressmaker
Tomorrow: Best Makeup
and Hairstyling
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