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 Makeup and Hairstyling
The nominees are:
Golda
Maestro
Oppenheimer
Poor Things
Society of the Snow
Golda
This was maybe not the best time for a movie celebrating the wartime actions of an Israeli prime minister, in this case Golda Meir’s handling of the Yom Kippur War. To be fair, Golda was released a little more than two months before the current violence in Gaza broke out, but I saw it two months after the fact, and let me tell you, the context has changed.
Anyway, this is a hair and makeup award, so let’s focus on that. This is one of those nominations like Judy a few years ago or The Iron Lady back in 2011 where the whole magic trick is to turn one famous person into another famous person, then have that trick hold up throughout the course of a film. Grading on that scale, Golda is a tremendous success, and Helen Mirren absolutely becomes Meir for the runtime of the movie.
The work is made more impressive by how much of the movie director Guy Nattiv shoots in closeups on Mirren’s face. The makeup work absolutely holds up under scrutiny, which is no simple feat. The movie, itself, maybe doesn’t hold up under similar scrutiny.
Maestro
I had a whole funny Shakespeare thing here, but it feels a little hokey. Eh, I’ll do it anyway: “What’s in a nose? That which we call a nose, on any other face, would smell as easily.” Perhaps not my best work. The point, in more ways than one, is the nose on Bradley Cooper’s face in this film, the nose that perhaps helps him transform into composer Leonard Berstein just a little better.
Some folks tried to turn it into a controversy before the movie came out, going so far as to call it “Jew face,” which is its own brand of problematic. The Berstein kids came out and said they were fine with it, that the movie is a lovely tribute to their parents, and that anyone focused on the nose needs to get over it. Their dad had kind of a big nose. It’s not a big deal.
So, the nose took up a lot of air in the room – so many nose puns! – but the onscreen transformation of Cooper into Bernstein is much fuller and richer than a single appendage. The old-age makeup on both Cooper and Carey Mulligan is tremendous, though of course we expect nothing less from Kazu Hiro and team. Hiro is a five-time nominee and two-time winner in this category for Darkest Hour and Bombshell.
Oppenheimer
For all of this film’s wonderful qualities, I thought the old-age makeup on Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt in the color sequences toward the end of this movie was kind of bad. Robert Downey Jr. gets a similar treatment in the black-and-white portions of the movie, but that holds up quite a bit better. In particular, in the scene when Robert Oppenheimer is receiving his award and congratulations from all the folks we’ve met throughout the film, the makeup is more distracting than enhancing. But, making movies is hard, and that’s just one man’s opinion.
Poor Things
One imagines the two major factors in this nomination were the prosthetic work on Willem Dafoe’s mad scientist and the tattoo work on Kathryn Hunter’s brothel owner, and we’ll get to those in a minute. First, I want to call out the hairstyling in this film, which is exceptional. Despite adding “Hairstyling” to the name of the award a number of years ago, few popular discussions center around the hair part of Makeup and Hairstyling.
In Poor Things, you can almost chart Bella Baxter’s (Emma Stone) entire story through the hairstyling alone. It’s a remarkable achievement, which is not even to mention all of the women in the brothel, as well as the men in this film, who are all stylishly coiffured. So, well-deserved cheers to the hairstyling department that worked on this picture.
As for the prosthetics, they are, of course, superb, telling us everything we need to know about the Dr. Frankenstein-esque God who kicks off this story. The tattoo work on Hunter’s Madame Swiney is also a marvel, with each tattoo telling a different story about this fascinating character’s past – whole lives lived that we get only a peek into thanks to her fabulous body art. One can only imagine how long she must have spent in makeup for all of that.
Society of the Snow
To my eye, this is actually the most impressive work of the bunch. As much as the makeup helps tell the story of Maestro or Golda or Oppenheimer, it’s more of a “nice to have” than a necessity. We would still believe Mirren as Meir or Cooper as Bernstein or Murphy as Oppenheimer without the makeup because they are talented actors who inhabit their characters. The makeup is great, but without it, you’d still have a movie. Not so with Society of the Snow.
For 72 days, the survivors of Flight 571 fought for their lives in the Andes Mountains. They suffered cuts and bruises. Some of those cuts got infected. They were malnourished. It was hell, but as the movie makes clear, it was a slow hell. Things devolved over time, not all at once. From a makeup standpoint, this means keeping track of where each survivor is in his story over the course of all 72 days. When did he get that cut? How much has it progressed? Is it getting worse or better?
The verisimilitude of the film depends on these questions having air-tight answers and those answers translating onto film through the makeup work. Miracle of miracles, it does, and we never once stop believing the reality of what these people suffered. That’s what great makeup can do for a film.
The final analysis
I’m betting on Maestro here. The mild controversy around the makeup is only likely to make more voters sit up and pay attention to the work. Poor Things is a potential spoiler in the category, but it’s hard to argue with what Hiro and team accomplish in Maestro. Fellow nominated makeup artist Kay Georgiou was previously nominated in this category for Joker – an award she lost to Hiro – while this is hairstylist Lori McCoy-Bell’s first nomination.
Will win: Maestro
Should win: Society of the Snow
Should have been here: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
A note about my favorite snub: I don’t have super strong feelings about this, but I do think the makeup effects in the Guardians of the Galaxy series are about as good as they come in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The first film in the series was nominated in this category – it lost to The Grand Budapest Hotel in 2014 – but neither of the sequels has made it in. The work here at least is a little more fun, inventive, and all encompassing than the work in something like Golda, which while impressive, is more limited in scope.
