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| The film within the film in Hail, Caesar!, nominated for Best Production 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 Production Design
The nominees are:
Arrival
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Hail, Caesar!
La La Land
Passengers
I do not believe the semantics of genre are that important
to the Academy. Others will argue and have argued a bias against horror and
science fiction or a bias for costume drama and inspiring true stories – if
such a thing can be considered a genre. I find these arguments reductive and
unconvincing. However, in this one area, I am sympathetic. No non-period,
non-fantasy film has won Best Production Design, or whatever other names by
which the award has gone over time, in 40 years. If it is not a bias, it is
certainly a blind spot.
In fact, it has been 15 years since a contemporary
non-fantasy film was even nominated – just nominated! – for this award. That
was Amelie in 2001, which of course lost to Moulin
Rouge!, a period musical with elements of fantasy. Fifteen years! What can
you do but throw up your hands at that point? The truth is with many of the design
categories, “best” means “most,” and the perceived degree of difficulty for
contemporary film is not as high.
That brings us to this year and the question of whether
Damien Chazelle’s Hollywood musical La La Land ends the
nomination drought. It is of course contemporary. Does it contain a fantastical
element or two? Undoubtedly. Specifically, the opening musical number and the
planetarium sequence, but both are set within the world we inhabit. It is not
committed to gritty realism, nor should it be, but it does not drift into the
genre of fantasy. That would be a stretch.
These questions, of course, matter little. It would be nice
to see a contemporary film nominated and win, if only to re-establish the art
of contemporary design work as being as formidable as period or fantasy work.
If La La Land is the film that can do that, I say, embrace it.
La La Land – On top of that, how cool
that the honor would be for the first couple of production design, David Wasco
and Sandy Reynolds-Wasco. Neither production designer Wasco nor set decorator
Reynolds-Wasco has been nominated before, but the husband-and-wife duo is
responsible for some of the most memorable and iconic films of the ’90s. Their
collaborations with Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp
Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2, Inglourious
Basterds) and Wes Anderson (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The
Royal Tenenbaums) are legend.
What all of those films have in common, apart from World War
II-set Inglourious Basterds, is that they are contemporary films
set in our worlds. Wasco and Reynolds-Wasco make the world we inhabit wondrous,
and they have done so again in La La Land. From the seedy jazz
clubs to the bright, bustling to studio lots to the Griffith Observatory
itself, they find the magic in the everyday lives of Chazelle’s characters and
they bring it to the forefront. If they cannot break the fantasy/period spell
cast over the Academy, no one can.
Arrival – The plot centers around two key
locations. There are brief interludes and short sequences elsewhere, but most
of the action in Arrival takes place inside the alien ship and
in the army tent that serves as human basecamp in the film. They are a study in
contrasts – the spare, cavernous ship, which resembles a seed outside and in,
against the busy, cluttered command center, which is full of papers and
screens. These differences are not solely cosmetic or practical but thematic.
Humanity is blind and hiding behind what it thinks it knows. The aliens
tellingly have nothing to hide.
Production designer Patrice Vermette, who has worked on
director Denis Villenueve’s past four films – Prisoners, Enemy, Sicario,
and Arrival – is a previous nominee for The Young
Victoria in 2009. Meanwhile, this is set decorator Paul Hotte’s first
nomination, though he was the head set dresser on Martin Scorsese’s The
Aviator, which won this category in 2004. On a mostly unrelated note –
though, those of you who know my love of horror film will understand – one of
Hotte’s earliest credits was for assistant props on David Cronenberg’s
body-horror masterpiece The Fly.
Hail, Caesar! – Joel and Ethan Coen are
marvels, and even their misfires are more interesting than the best efforts of
lesser directors. Despite being a fan of the Coens and of old Hollywood, Hail,
Caesar! and its willfully abstruse plotting left me cold and
underwhelmed. It is a fun, zany ride all the way through, of course, but at the
end, it does not feel like it amounts to much, particularly set against even
the Coens’ other comedies such as Fargo or A Serious
Man. This is the Brothers in The Big Lebowski mode, which
I know is some people’s bag, but it isn’t mine.
However, no one working on a Coen Brothers film ever gives
less than 100 percent, and longtime Coen collaborators production designer Jess
Gonchor and set decorator Nancy Haigh are no exception. Their reproduction of a
1950s Hollywood studio backlot is lovely, a world unto itself in which the
audience is happy to be lost. It is kind of remarkable this is only Gonchor’s
second nomination after his notice for the Coens’ True Grit,
despite his work on Capote, A Serious Man, and Inside
Llewyn Davis, all of which would have been worthy of the honor. Haigh, on
the other hand, is a seven-time nominee who previously won for Bugsy.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them –
Is it me, or could only a film in the Harry Potter franchise –
or maybe The Lord of the Rings – be burdened with such a
cumbersome title and still make a profit? Anyway, the Harry Potter films
never really caught on in a big way with the Academy, but four of the series’
eight films found room in Production Design. The team of art director Stuart
Craig and set decorator Stephanie McMillan were nominated for the first,
fourth, and final two installments. Craig returns here for Fantastic
Beasts, while Anna Pinnock steps in for McMillan, who died in 2013, as
nominated set decorator.
Craig has a total of 11 nominations and three Oscar wins
for Gandhi, Dangerous Liaisons, and The English
Patient. Pinnock won her first Oscar two years ago for The Grand Budapest
Hotel, and this is her sixth nomination overall. The pair is likely
nominated here for recreating 1920s New York City with great care and in
painstaking detail, as well as for the great halls and cluttered offices of the
wizarding world’s bureaucratic headquarters. This is the kind of big work in a
fantasy blockbuster that has the power to win over voters.
Passengers – Is Passengers pretty
to look at? You could say that. You could also say it lacks logic, characters,
and motivation. Count me among those who were not impressed by director Morten
Tyldum’s previous feature, Best Picture-nominated The Imitation Game,
finding it simplistic and cliché-ridden. Here, Tyldum somehow manages to sneak
under the low bar of expectations with a movie that is not just dumb but
outright offensive and wastes solid performances from its charismatic leads.
But we’re here to talk about the Oscar-nominated production
design, aren’t we? Production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas and set decorator Gene
Serdena are two time nominees, Dyas previously for Inception and
Serdena for Her. Like those two features, Passengers depicts
a sterile near-future in which the messy edges of life are smoothed over for
sleek, clean presentation, except this movie takes place on a big spaceship. I
doubt if much of the Academy even saw this movie, let alone will be voting for
it.
The final analysis
The only thing standing in the way of La La Land here
is four decades of anti-contemporary bias. Arrival would be a
handsome and deserving winner, but the work may be too subdued for this group.
Interestingly, while a Best Picture nomination is a good indicator of strength
in most of the other crafts categories, that has not been the case historically
in Production Design.
The Academy has had no qualms about rewarding a big, heavily
festooned picture that wears its design bona fides on its sleeve. Recent wins
for films such as The Great Gatsby, Alice in Wonderland,
and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street mean
something like Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them cannot
be counted out as a spoiler. In the end, though, I expect the Academy’s love
for La La Land to win out and end the drought for contemporary
film.
Will win: La La Land
Should win: La La Land
Should have been here: The Handmaiden
Tomorrow: Best Costume Design
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