Countdown to the Oscars: Best Production Design

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.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Production Design

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

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Production Design

The recreation of the Berlin Wall in Bridge of Spies is one of the most impressive feats of production design this year.

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 this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.

Best Production Design

The nominees are:

Bridge of Spies

The Danish Girl

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Martian

The Revenant

If the point of film is to transport us to other worlds, which I believe it is, then the art directors, set decorators, and production designers are the people who make those worlds feel real. They provide the texture and life that allow us to get lost in places we never imagined finding ourselves. They create the universes in which filmmakers set their stories and the spaces in which actors explore their characters’ lives. Their job is to make the artifice of film feel like reality for a couple hours.

It is probably for all those reasons the Academy has shown disproportionate love to period and fantasy films over the years. It has been nearly 40 years since a contemporary drama won this category – All the President’s Men in 1976, primarily for its recreation of the office of The Washington Post. This year, the only nominee that could even be considered contemporary would be The Martian, and it is a sci-fi film set in the future, so even if it were to win, I think the streak stays alive. The rest of the nominees fit firmly within the confines of the Academy’s wheelhouse.

Mad Max: Fury Road – From that jumping-off point, Mad Max: Fury Road is a fantasy, I suppose, but in only the loosest sense of that word. George Miller’s twisted post-apocalyptic actioner takes place in a true hellscape. Every element of this film looks like it was created by demons, which is absolutely perfect for the feeling Miller is trying to evoke. There are a lot of beautiful little details in this film, but if we are being honest, what people remember are the war rigs and other vehicles. They are fully operational marvels of design and craftsmanship – and they look damn cool.

Production designer Colin Gibson, a first-time nominee with few feature films to his credit, came up with the designs for most of the war rigs, and he and his team brought his nightmarish ideas to life. Meanwhile, set decorator Lisa Thompson, also a first-time nominee, populates each scene with the kind of small touches that sell the truth of this hell.

Bridge of Spies – Moving from the creation of a whole new reality to the recreation of an old one, Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies is a gorgeously realized Cold War thriller that takes audience back in time to early 1960s Berlin. While much of the film is wonderfully decorated – James Donovan’s home décor and the Soviet offices are particularly impressive – the element that stands out most, as I mentioned at length in my review, is the Berlin Wall. To watch the wall go up in Spielberg’s film is to forget the last 50 years of history and be transported to the moment when a world was literally and figuratively split in two.

Adam Stockhausen, the film’s production designer, won his first Academy Award just last year for Wes Anderson’s storybook The Grand Budapest Hotel, and he was previously nominated two years ago for 12 Years a Slave. Meanwhile, these are the first nominations for set decorators Rena DeAngelo and Bernhard Heinrich. DeAngelo did, however, win an Emmy for production design for her work on the pilot episode of Mad Men, which evokes a similar early ‘60s feel, though with a clear emphasis on Americana.

The Danish Girl – A bit of a surprise nominee, though not entirely unpredictable, director Tom Hooper’s Lili Elbe biopic may not have caught on much with the Academy, but it is nothing if not beautifully rendered. This is the second year in a row a film about the life of an artist has been nominated in this category – after the excellent Mr. Turner last year – and with good reason. The controlled chaos of an artist’s workspace is not easy to capture, while the extravagant interiors of the high-class art world are an equally difficult challenge to master.

Production designer Eve Stewart has two previous nominations for wildly different work – the ornate designs of Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy and the understated reserve of Hooper’s The King’s Speech. Michael Standish on the other hand has been set decorator on just three feature films, though his work on last year’s Victor Frankenstein stands out despite that film’s critical and commercial failure. Stewart and Standish’s work on The Danish Girl is admirable, but they are up against four Best Picture nominees in this category, which means they are probably the least likely winners.

The Revenant – It is easy to get lost in the gorgeous, natural exteriors of The Revenant, but the production design team is as responsible for the beauty of the film’s world as Mother Nature. The work particularly shines in the varied designs of the camps of the many disparate groups trudging through the wilderness such as the French-Canadian fur trappers, the various native tribes, and Hugh Glass’ roaming campsite. In addition, Fort Kiowa, the destination for every major character in the film, is a tremendous feat of design and art direction, appearing as a sanctuary of human establishment amid the bleak and unforgiving wild.

Production designer Jack Fisk, a previous nominee for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, has worked extensively with director Terrence Malick. Indeed, his work on Malick’s The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, and in particular The New World feels of a piece with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s very Malick-like meditation on the natural world and man’s place in it. Set decorator Hamish Purdy has spent most of his career as an assistant on big-budget blockbusters, but he finds the right level of restraint and detailing to fit perfectly into the world of The Revenant.

The Martian – I complained last year that the Academy sometimes is inexplicably wowed by sci-fi films that recreate the complex inner workings of spaceships. Specifically, nominations in consecutive years for Gravity and Interstellar felt unwarranted. I stand by those complaints, but Ridley Scott’s The Martian is a different story. Yes, it also features a number of sequences aboard semi-futuristic spaceships, but its real standout work is in the Martian basecamp and the NASA headquarters, which each take elements familiar to us and make them fresh and interesting.

Arthur Max is a three-time nominee who has worked almost exclusively as a production designer for Scott the past 15 years. As much as Scott has hopped across genres, Max has followed him there with wonderfully varied work on films as disparate as Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, American Gangster, and Prometheus. Set decorator Celia Bobak, a previous nominee for the musical adaptation The Phantom of the Opera, has not worked in the sci-fi genre before, which probably works to her advantage in making us feel like The Martian is not set very far outside our own reality.

The final analysis

The Art Directors Guild, the only real precursor for this category apart from the BAFTA Awards later this month, hand out three feature awards – fantasy, period, and contemporary. The winners this year were Mad Max: Fury Road for fantasy, The Revenant for period, and The Martian for contemporary. Bridge of Spies and The Danish Girl were also nominees for period. If we narrow the field to just the three winners, it seems probable the Academy will be drawn to the ostentatiousness of Mad Max: Fury Road, giving that film the slight edge here.

Will win: Mad Max: Fury Road

Should win: Mad Max: Fury Road

Should have been here: Ex Machina

Tomorrow: Best Costume Design

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Production Design

In The Grand Budapest Hotel, the hotel itself is as much a character as any of its guests.

Each day as we make our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

Best Production Design

The nominees are:

The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Imitation Game

Interstellar

Into the Woods

Mr. Turner

The great advantage film actors have over their stage brethren is that they get to ply their craft in a fully realized world. When a character walks offstage, we instinctively know the actor is still there, waiting in the wings or backstage in the green room, but when a character leaves the room in a film, he is entering a whole other world of possibilities. It is the job of the production designers, art directors, and set decorators to create these worlds, and the best have the ability to transport audiences into the universes they create.

As someone who grew up around carpenters, handymen, and generally skilled builders but never had an aptitude for the work myself, I have a great deal of respect for the people who put together film sets. It is no easy feat, as on any given day, they may be called upon to conceive of a train station, construct a boudoir, or dress an entire warzone. The next day, the task list could be completely different, but these chameleons of craft are always ready for the next challenge.

Similar to costume design, the Academy favors flashy period work and grand scale when voting in this category. In fact, the last non-period, non-fantasy film to win this award was All the President’s Men in 1976, though that depends on whether you consider Warren Beatty’s 1978 winner Heaven Can Wait a fantasy film, but the point remains the same. It has been more than three decades since a film set in the present day has won this award. That streak is certain to continue this year as all five nominees are either period, fantasy, or both.

The Grand Budapest Hotel – Okay, I have spent the last few days calling most of The Grand Budapest Hotel overrated, and I will admit to being a bit crabby about it. The film just does not work for me. However, the production design is another matter. The titular hotel is a character in the film, and as the title would suggest, it sure is grand.

While the film intentionally trades on classic storybook tropes, production designer Adam Stockhausen and set decorator Anna Pinnock mesh that style with elements of classical melodramas such as Gone with the Wind or All That Heaven Allows, creating an intimate series of interiors that exist within a clearly epic outer environment. In this constantly snowing country, the reds, pinks, and purples of the Grand Budapest Hotel provide a warming embrace, a place to shield yourself from the cold, not to mention the velvety textures of every inch of every surface in the inn.

Beyond that, there is some gorgeous miniature work the blends seamlessly with the heightened reality of the universe director Wes Anderson creates. You have never seen and will never see a chase on skis like the one in this film. It all works because the artifice is made plain by Stockhausen and Pinnock. They do not try to convince us that any of this exists in our world. Instead, they try to bring us into theirs. Stockhausen was nominated last year for 12 Years a Slave, while Pinnock is a five-time nominee, including a dual nomination this year that includes her work on Into the Woods.

Mr. Turner – Mike Leigh’s excellent JMW Turner biopic is a bit of an odd duck this awards season. It made my top 10, and in fact, it made a lot of critics’ top 10s. It is a great film, but it is a really hard film to love. I understand that, so I was not holding out much hope for Academy Awards recognition. Four nominations in key crafts categories were more than I could have asked for, but you know – if you give a mouse a cookie. I wish Timothy Spall could have found traction in Best Actor, Leigh in Original Screenplay or Director, and obviously the film in Best Picture. Oh, well.

Production designer Suzie Davis and set decorator Charlotte Watts are both first-time nominees, and they will probably have to be content with the nomination, but make no mistake – their work is fabulous. It is not easy to work within the dingy atmosphere Leigh sets Mr. Turner in, but Davis and Watts bring out the natural beauty of the world and splash color sparingly but effectively where they can.

The bevy of paintings covering the walls of almost all the interiors would be enough to impress, but the organized chaos of Turner’s workspace and the plush serenity of his seaside escape are a study in contrast, bringing out both sides of the enigmatic painter at the center of the story. Add to that the brilliant period details in all corners of the film, and you have a deserving winner in any other year.

Into the Woods – Much of what makes Into the Woods the movie it is boils down to the woods. Production designer Dennis Gassner, a five-time nominee and the only previous winner in the group, and set decorator Pinnock do an excellent job of creating a dark, foreboding place in which to set this off-kilter story. Branches twist and turn and grab and pull, creating an immersive, tactile sensation for the viewer. One can imagine walking through and collecting the little cuts and scratches that accompany a walk through the forest.

The whole design has a “fairytales after dark” feel to it, which perfectly matches the tone of the film. When Prince Charming travels into the village to find Cinderella, it feels as though we are stepping into the storybooks of our collective childhood but long after their prime. Years of neglect have left the streets and homes in disrepair. For an audience that was maybe craving a sweet shot of nostalgia, the world Pinnock and Gassner create is a harsh dose of reality but still cloaked in the memories of a fairytale world.

The Imitation Game – For a movie that underwhelmed in so many regards, one thing in The Imitation Game stood out clearly from its first appearance on screen: the Turing Machine. Like the hotel in The Grand Budapest Hotel, the Turing Machine becomes a character in the film, such that it even has a name, Christopher. For inventor Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), it is the closest relationship he has, much closer than with any of his flesh and blood coworkers. 

It falls to production designer Maria Djurkovic and set decorator Tatiana Macdonald, both first-time nominees, to make that relationship believable. They succeed brilliantly, fudging the history a bit to create an impressive machine that moves, thinks, and even seems to feel – a fine metaphor for the film’s depiction of Turing. In addition, Macdonald does a great job filling the workspaces of the characters with meaningful clutter. This is definitely the look of an office in which we imagine math geniuses might work.

Interstellar – Prestige space films tend to be nominated in this category because the art directors’ branch just cannot seem to help itself when it comes to the big flashing displays and important-looking knobs that make up the consuls of movie space shuttles. It seems to me an odd tendency. I think we are at a point of cultural awareness where we all know what the insides of spaceships look like. When Stanley Kubrick’s crew rebuilt the cockpit of an Air Force bomber from a magazine picture for Dr. Strangelove, it was innovative, exciting, and cool. This is a bit old hat by now.

More generally, the whole color palette of the film seems to range from sleepy to blah, as it often does in Christopher Nolan’s films. Production designer Nathan Crowley has done six Nolan films now and has earned nominations for half of them, including this one, while set decorator Gary Fettis has had a strong run of collaborations with Clint Eastwood recently, including this year’s American Sniper. As anyone working at this level, Crowley and Fettis are clearly talented craftsmen, but Nolan does them no favors in Interstellar, and their work simply is not allowed to shine through.

The final analysis

Despite solid work in most respects from the rest of the nominees, when it comes to the win, there is The Grand Budapest Hotel, and there is everything else. Even Anderson’s detractors – among whom I count myself – can agree the production design of his films is always lush, vibrant, and full of life. That has never been truer than it is here. If any another pair walks up on stage on Oscar night, it will be downright shocking. Probably only Into the Woods could mount any sort of challenge, but really, there is no challenger.

Will win: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Should win: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wish it had been here: Birdman