Welcome to this year’s edition of Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, where we will break down each of the 23 categories, analyze the films, and make some guesses at their awards prospects.
Best Production Design
The nominees are:
Barbie
Killers of the Flower Moon
Napoleon
Oppenheimer
Poor Things
Barbie
We’ve never seen anything like Barbie Land on film before. It’s a complete world unto itself, meant to recreate the experience of a very specific feeling with which most of us are familiar. It’s a land of plastic and play. Everything is tactile but in the most artificial way possible. Barbie’s Dream House truly comes to life. As does her car. And her entire world, which actually reflects the collective imaginations of millions of children across the globe.
This is the seventh Academy Award nomination shared by the team of production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer. They have never won. Barbie recalls their work on the live-action Beauty and the Beast remake, for which they were nominated, making real something that many children have only ever dreamed.
Killers of the Flower Moon
One of the best things about Martin Scorsese movies is that he never cuts a corner when it comes to creating a world. When he needed to film the Five Points for Gangs of New York, he went ahead and had it built. When he needed a majestic old train station for Hugo, his team built one. So, when it came time to bring the world of the Osage peoples of 1920s Oklahoma to the screen, you damn well knew that was going to get built, too. And, you just know Scorsese was thrilled to get the chance to flex some muscle on a western.
Production designer Jack Fisk is a modern master with three nominations to his name, all for western or western-adjacent films: Killers of the Flower Moon, The Revenant, and There Will Be Blood. He has never won this award, but he absolutely will one of these days. This is set decorator Adam Willis’ first nomination. While he also did set decoration for Oppenheimer, he is not part of the nominated team for that film.
Napoleon
I’m not sure which is the more impressive feat on this film: recreating the France of the Napoleonic era or believably reconstructing the realities of a battlefield in the early 1800s. But, no one is forcing us to choose, so we’ll just say it’s all tremendous work. I will say I found myself particularly impressed by the makeshift camps established by the troops amid battles, tent cities with burning fires and few creature comforts.
This is production designer Arthur Max’s fourth career nomination, all for collaborations with director Ridley Scott. Max’s previous nominations came for Gladiator, American Gangster, and The Martian. Set decorator Elli Griff, whose work you have seen in Glass Onion and Black Hawk Down, among others (including The Others), is on her first career nomination.
Oppenheimer
It is poetic that a movie about a man who built a town in the desert is nominated for the town the filmmakers built in the desert. It’s a beautiful, subtle piece of work that never suggests anything more than a government-funded project erected as quickly as possible, which is as it should be. There are absolutely no frills, no embellishments to counteract the veracity of what Christopher Nolan is trying to portray.
Production designer Ruth de Jong and set decorator Claire Kaufman are both first-time nominees. De Jong has been a frequent art director for Terrence Mallick in recent years and did the production design for Jordan Peele’s two most recent films, Us and Nope. Kaufman, meanwhile, has worked on a number of Adam Sandler productions, as well as Greta Gerwig’s Little Women and Noah Baumbach’s White Noise.
Poor Things
A perfect marriage of flash and substance, the world of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things is a steampunk fantasia, filled with massive, colorful sets, hyper-real model and miniature work, and some of the most gorgeous matte paintings of the modern era. Nothing ever feels quite real, which is why nothing ever feels out of place. In its own magnificently strange way, everything just makes sense.
Production designers James Price and Shona Heath and set decorator Zsuzsa Mihalek are all first-time nominees this year. Price also did the production design for this year’s The Iron Claw, while Heath is a well known prop-builder and sculptor doing production design for her first major feature film. Mihalek has an eclectic career that includes work on Atomic Blonde, Don’t Breathe, and Béla Tarr’s slow-cinema masterpiece Werckmeister Harmonies.
The final analysis
This stat came up last year, but it’s worth repeating here: 10 times in 23 years this century, the Oscars for Costume and Production design have gone to the same film. The last time it happened was 2018, when Black Panther took home both awards.
This is also just the third time since 1967, when the Academy stopped handing out separate awards for color and black and white in both categories, that the two lineups have been exactly the same. It happened in 1969, when Anne of the Thousand Days won Costume Design and Hello, Dolly! won Production Design. Then, it happened again in 2003, when The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won both awards.
I’m predicting Poor Things goes two-for-two in these categories. If you want to project a split with Barbie, that’s reasonable, but which one wins in which category? They’re both tremendous works of art that create whole never-before-seen universes that feel at once real and lived in while also being fantastical and otherworldly.
Will win: Poor Things
Should win: Barbie
Should have been here: The Zone of Interest
A note about my favorite snub: Much like the house in Parasite, the design of the home and more specifically the garden make this movie possible. The precision and detail in every element of Chris Oddy’s production design and Joanna Kus and Katarzsyna Sikora’s art direction speaks directly to the heart of this film. The home is a mark of success. It means the family that lives in it has achieved something. But, what they have achieved is unspeakably evil.
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