Countdown to the Oscars: Best Editing

We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.

Best Editing

The nominees are:

The Banshees of Inisherin

Elvis

Everything Everywhere All at Once

TÁR

Top Gun: Maverick

Movies are getting longer. Have you noticed? Probably. It’s not a problem for me. Give me a great movie whose world I can live in and let it run as long as the director sees fit. I mention this only because as movies get longer, perhaps counterintuitively, editing takes on even greater importance. The key question becomes: How does an editor pull viewers through a lengthy story without either exhausting or boring them? It is a tightrope walk, and falling one way or the other means failure for the movie.

This is why, apart from Best Director, Editing is the award most associated with Best Picture at the Oscars. Industry members recognize that if a film is good, it is made that way through editing. If it succeeds, it is because someone sat at the controls and figured out how all the pieces fit. A bad film can be well edited, but I defy you to find a great film that is poorly edited. Hence, the five Best Picture nominees cited in the category this year.

Everything Everywhere All at Once – If the award were called “most editing,” this film would win in a walk, and it would deserve to. Best Editing, I’m not so sure. The editing is certainly flashy as we jump from universe to universe, often covering a dozen or more in the span of a couple seconds. I understand the nomination, and I will understand when this film wins the award, the power of its Best Picture heat being a likely deciding factor anyway. But as someone who found the whole film haphazard and exhausting, I would say the editing is mostly at fault.

Paul Rogers has been the editor for just one other feature-length fiction film in his career. That would be Everything Everywhere co-director Daniel Scheinert’s lone solo directorial effort, The Death of Dick Long. I haven’t seen that particular film, so I can’t compare it to what’s going on here. In any event, mine is a minority opinion, and it is certainly not shared within the industry. Rogers already has won the BAFTA and will likely win the Oscar.

Top Gun: Maverick – This is probably the most traditional nominee in this bunch and one of four Oscars for which the original film was also nominated. It lost the award to that year’s Best Picture winner, Platoon, a bit of history I expect to repeat this year. The action in this film truly is “whiz-bang,” to put it succinctly. It is no easy feat to cut the kind of high-octane action sequences that appear throughout this film while keeping the audience acutely aware of all the major players, their relative locations, and the stakes. The film loses me a bit in the third act with an ending that drags on one sequence too long, but for most of the runtime, the tension is appropriately high.

Editor Eddie Hamilton seems to have become Tom Cruise’s go-to guy over the past few years. Prior to cutting Top Gun: Maverick, he also worked on the two most recent Mission: Impossible movies, Rogue Nation and Fallout, and he is signed up to do the next two, Dead Reckoning Parts One and Two. Each of his collaborations with Cruise (and directors Joseph Kosinski and Christopher McQuarrie) has been a masterclass in stylish action and seamless editing.

Elvis – Editors Matta Villa and Jonathan Redmond, who previously worked together on Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, have an unenviable task here. They must condense the life of one of the most famous and talked about figures in American history into a comprehensible two-and-a-half-hour film. I would say they do not quite succeed, but they make a damn fine effort of it.

Perhaps any issues can be chalked up to storytelling decisions on the part of the director, but the film’s pace is a problem. It glosses over long stretches of history in an instant while spending an unfathomable amount of time on sequences that could be cut in half and still accomplish their goals. Villa and Redmond do an admirable job, but Luhrmann is gonna do what Luhrmann is gonna do, and here, that means sacrificing some manner of coherence and structure for style.

The Banshees of Inisherin – Somewhere around the midpoint of the film, you wonder how the filmmakers will possibly stretch this story any further. Then, miraculously, they do, and by the end, you wonder how two hours flew by so quickly. Such is the brilliance of Martin McDonagh’s narrative and Mikkel E. G. Nielsen’s propulsive editing style. The story is one of how small actions snowball and how snowballs become avalanches. 

Nielsen allows the early passages to breathe while slowly ramping up the tension. Then, by the end, events transpire so fast you can barely catch your breath, and you wish it would slow down so the characters could take a second to think. This ultimately becomes the film’s tragic irony. Nielsen was previously nominated and won this award in 2020 for similarly tight, precise work on the excellent Sound of Metal. 

TÁR – Writer-director Todd Field’s choice of Monika Willi to cut his dread-soaked epic makes sense when you consider her most frequent previous collaborator: Michael Haneke. She has edited all of the Austrian master’s film’s since The Piano Teacher in 2001, including Palme d’Or winners The White Ribbon and Amour. Haneke specializes in dark humor amid tremendous human failings, a description that could easily be applied to TÁR, which makes Willi the perfect complement to everything Field is trying to accomplish.

There is a sense throughout TÁR that the center cannot hold. The central figure is attempting to prop up too many lies and delusions at once. Willi and Field take their time to pile up these deceptions (self and otherwise) until the weight of it all slowly and inevitably crushes her. The balancing of these many setups and payoffs is a tremendous feat of pacing and structure, turning one woman’s fall from grace into a journey into a cultural maelstrom.

The final analysis

As we said up top, Best Editing is closely tied to Best Picture and has been for the past 40 years, at least as regards the nomination. The win, not so much. In fact, since 2010, the only Best Picture winner also to win Best Editing was Argo in 2012. That changes this year, as Everything Everywhere All at Once is way out in front for both awards. Truth be told, I am more confident in its eventual Editing triumph than I am in Picture, but both seem like locks at this point in the season.

The Best Picture tie-in matters only in so much as the curious omission of All Quiet on the Western Front suggests one fewer major challenger to Everything Everywhere. War pictures tend to do well with the Academy’s Editing Branch, so the snub here suggests just a little weakness in the armor of an otherwise formidable contender. Regardless, Everything Everywhere All at Once will win this award, and it won’t be close.

Will win: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Should win: The Banshees of Inisherin

Should have been here: Decision to Leave

A note about my favorite snub: Park Chan-wook’s twisty, romantic crime thriller is a masterclass in misdirection. Every time you think you have your footing, Park and editor Kim Sang-bum pull the rug out from under you, showing you something you thought you understood in a whole new light.

Next time: Sound