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 Sound
The nominees are:
The Creator
Maestro
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
Oppenheimer
The Zone of Interest
A couple years ago, I predicted that the merging of the two sound awards (Editing and Mixing) into a single Best Sound Oscar would lead the category to drift toward bigger, more bombastic movies, generally favoring action and war pictures. Largely, that has proven true. In 2021, Dune took home the Sound award (I’ll put $5 on Dune Part II winning this award at next year’s ceremony, too), and last year, Top Gun: Maverick won the prize over a field of mostly big, bombastic action and war movies.
This year, we’ve still got the big, IMAX-ready action and war movies: The Creator, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, and Oppenheimer. There’s also a nominee that could be broadly categorized as a musical: Maestro, taking the Elvis slot from last year. Any of these would be an understandable winner, but this year, a funny thing happened on the way to the Dolby. Namely, The Zone of Interest showed up and ate everyone’s lunch.
Now, I’m not saying Oppenheimer won’t ride its Best Picture momentum to victory here, and it would be a perfectly worthy winner. Christopher Nolan’s film plays with sound in a number of interesting ways, particularly the times when he chooses to drop it out entirely, like during the Trinity test sequence. Oppenheimer’s walk into the gym and speech to the crowd after the successful test is another place where the sound design absolutely shines. It certainly could happen … but that’s not the way the winds have been blowing.
The Zone of Interest is a mostly meditative drama that takes place largely at a single house that happens to share a wall with the most notorious concentration camp of World War II. So, what makes the sound so special? First, if you’ve seen the movie, this is not a question you’re asking. You get it. But, to put it succinctly, the sound is everything. It’s a sonic collage of life and death at the fenceline of an atrocity.
Not only is the sound technically impressive – every sound you hear has been meticulously gathered by the foley team and precision placed by the editors and mixers – but it becomes a key part of the narrative. The sounds of the concentration camp over that wall bleed into the daily lives of the people who live in this house, subtly revealing who has a conscience and who doesn’t.
This happens sometimes when a certain craft on a film is so undeniable it becomes a talking point for everyone who sees the movie. Think the art direction and visual effects of Avatar or the cinematography of Birdman. The more it moves to the forefront of voters’ minds, the more likely an unusual winner is to topple the more traditional nominees in a category.
When I say “more traditional,” of course I mean things like Mission: Impossible, which does feature a truly magnificent soundscape. It’s so easy for the sound in a movie like this to go wrong – the punches are too heavy; the explosions are too big; everything can be just a little too much. Not the case here. Every nominated person on this team has won at least one Academy Award, and three of the four are coming off a win just last year for Top Gun: Maverick.
It should not be overlooked that Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest would be favorites here regardless of everything said above since they are the two Best Picture nominees in the lineup. You have to go back to 2007, when The Bourne Ultimatum won both Sound Editing and Mixing, to find a year when a Best Picture nominee didn’t win at least one of the sound awards. Of course, since the consolidation, a Best Picture nominee has won every time.
So, what’s it going to be? Oppenheimer is great. It’s likely to be a crafts juggernaut, and predicting it to win here would be the safe and easy thing to do. But, I just feel something brewing with The Zone of Interest. In about a week, we’ll see if that hunch pays off.
Will win: The Zone of Interest
Should win: The Zone of Interest
Should have been here: Killers of the Flower Moon
A note about my favorite snub: I would call it a mild surprise that Martin Scorsese’s western epic missed out on a nod here. The crafts are, of course, impeccable, and the sound is no exception to that. This film seamlessly blends the natural world with the world of machinery and menace, all while incorporating Robbie Robertson’s brilliant score and never losing an ounce of clarity. Wonderful work.
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