Last Cinema Standing: Sicario

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Friday, February 12, 2016

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Sound Editing

The Martian is a great example of solid, nuts-and-bolts filmmaking, including its Oscar-nominated sound editing.

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 Sound Editing

The nominees are:

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Martian

The Revenant

Sicario

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Just to revisit this quickly, yesterday, we covered sound mixing, which refers to the balancing of all the different sonic elements of a film. Today, we will talk about sound editing, which refers mostly to the creation of sound effects and the general sonic landscape of a movie. If you hear a rippling stream or leaves rustling or a distant coyote howling, those noises were created in the sound editing process. If you have ever seen Albert Brooks’ 1981 comedy Modern Romance – which you really should anyway – then you have a better understanding of this process than most.

As opposed to Best Sound Mixing, in which there is a fairly even split between rewarding musicals and action movies, Best Sound Editing is almost exclusively the domain of action movies when it comes to winners. War films in particular have done well throughout the years. Since 1990, this award has gone to an action-adventure movie or a war film every year but two – Hugo in 2011 and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992. This year will not add a third title to that list as every nominee could be categorized somewhat broadly as either action or adventure or both.

The sound categories are tied pretty closely together – which adds to the confusion of what each means individually – and often share many of the same nominees. The differences highlight the biases in each. For instance, over the last three years, Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing have shared four nominees. In 2013, Inside Llewyn Davis (musical) was nominated for Sound Mixing, while All Is Lost (adventure drama) took its place in Sound Editing.

In 2014, Whiplash (musical) was nominated and won for Sound Mixing, while The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (action-adventure) was cited instead in Sound Editing. This year, Bridge of Spies (legal drama) hit in Sound Mixing, while Sicario (action thriller) made it into the five for Sound Editing. When searching for a winner in this category then, it pays to look for the most critically acclaimed action film. So, that is where we will start.

Mad Max: Fury Road – This is the eighth and final crafts category we will cover in which Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant are pitted against each other. I said in my first Countdown to the Oscars piece this year that the most likely scenario would be for one or the other to run the table, winning a majority of the crafts awards and leaving the other relatively unrewarded. I have not exactly predicted things that way. By the end of this piece, I will have predicted The Revenant to take four crafts awards, Mad Max: Fury Road to win three, and neither to win Best Costume Design. It is just that close of a year.

The funny thing about it is these two films could not be more different or, some would say, incomparable. George Miller has created a loud, in-you-face action extravaganza with Mad Max: Fury Road, while Alejandro González Iñárritu has crafted a quiet, meditative western saga with The Revenant. When it comes to these crafts categories, it will be a matter of whether voters prefer the work to be more overt or subtler. It would be hard for them to go wrong in either direction.

Supervising sound editor Mark A. Mangini is a four-time nominee who has never won, and his last nomination came in 1997 for The Fifth Element. Sound designer David White has received his first nomination for his first narrative feature film credit, though he has worked on a number of documentaries, as well as the television series Farscape. Mangini and White have tapped into the same gonzo energy that informs the rest of Mad Max: Fury Road and produced a soundscape that incorporates elements of a post-apocalyptic future and an ancient-seeming desert that was here long before we first drove our war rigs through its sands.

The Revenant – The architects of The Revenant’s magnificent soundscape are supervising sound editor Martín Hernández and sound designer Lon Bender. Their task was to take viewers back to a time before anything we know now existed, a natural world that had yet to be destroyed by human contact. The work is a triumph, bringing together the chirps and cries of the animal kingdom, the crunch of the snow and the crackle of a fire, and the ever-present wind howling across a pristine landscape. With your eyes closed, you could get lost in the sonic environment Hernández and Bender cultivate.

Hernández earned his first nomination last year for the backstage cacophony he helped create on Iñárritu’s Birdman, while Bender is a four-time nominee who won his only Oscar in 1995 for Braveheart. Their work on The Revenant speaks for itself in its complexity and beauty, and whether it wins will likely come down to how willing Academy members are to listen to the artistry on display. If they really listen and hear it, I do not see how they could choose anything else.

The Martian – I touched on this briefly yesterday, but The Martian really is an interesting case this year. When compared against The Revenant and Mad Max: Fury Road, it has neither the artistry nor the ambition of either. Against the other popular sci-fi film in the lineup, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it does not have the same sense of scope or operatic grandeur. The Martian is a fine movie, solid, nuts-and-bolts filmmaking that the Academy obviously warmed to, but it just cannot stand out in this crowd.

Sound designer and supervising sound editor Oliver Tarney earned his only previous nomination two years ago for Captain Phillips, another piece of solid, nuts-and-bolts filmmaking. His work on The Martian is terrific as he brings to life a world we could scarcely imagine, turning the Martian landscape into a tangible reality for both Mark Watney (Matt Damon) and the audience. In any other year, this would be winning work, but in this field, it simply cannot compete.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens – For otherworldly sound design, voters might be more likely to look to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It is the showier of the two sci-fi films in this group and probably constitutes the showiest film of the five. The sound design feat of any Star Wars film is to create an immersive sonic experience out of essentially never-before-heard sounds. The droids and alien creatures, as well as the space crafts and weaponry, of course do not exist. The sound team must invent it all, and the remarkable thing about a Star Wars movie, particularly from the original trilogy and The Force Awakens, is that the audience gets so caught up in spectacle that we never once question the reality.

Supervising sound editor Matthew Wood served in the same position on all three prequel films in the Star Wars series and has previously been nominated for There Will Be Blood and the outstanding sound design of Wall-E, still among the best sonic achievements in recent cinema history. This is the first nomination for David Accord, also a supervising sound editor on the film. Star Wars: The Force Awakens would certainly be a deserving winner, and to a certain kind of voter, it might make the most sense here. It will be a matter of whether the prestige of the rest of the field trumps the spectacle of this nominee.

Sicario – Director Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario is a taut thriller with a number of outstanding elements, though the whole is more conventional than I think its staunchest supporters will admit. One thing it has going for it is an incredibly virtuosic climax, featuring a nighttime raid through a system of drug-smuggling tunnels. We covered Roger Deakins’ stellar night-vision cinematography already, but the sound design has just as much to do with making this scene work as every heavy step, crumbling rock, or clicking gun could spell doom for our heroes.

Supervising sound editor Alan Robert Murray has received eight nominations in this category, second only to the legendary Richard Hymns. Murray has won twice, including just last year for his work on Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. His other win came for Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima in 2006. Both of those were more traditional winners than Sicario would make. Sicario feels smaller and more intimate, which is perfect thematically but not exactly helpful in terms of awards.

The final analysis

The way the crafts categories go will be a big indicator in terms of what kind of night it is going to be. If The Revenant starts picking up award after award, we could be headed for a history-making sweep for Iñárritu and his film. If Mad Max: Fury Road takes a few, it will leave the top categories more open-ended. I think if the Academy really wants to reward the best achievements in filmmaking, though, and not just the flashiest, The Revenant will end up with the majority of these awards.

Will win: The Revenant

Should win: The Revenant

Should have been here: Anomalisa

Tomorrow: Best Adapted Screenplay

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Original Score

Ennio Morricone's score for The Hateful Eight is the frontrunner at the Academy Awards for Best Original Score.

Best Original Score

The nominees are:

Bridge of Spies

Carol

The Hateful Eight

Sicario

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

So, I spent a lot of words yesterday tearing down the music branch for its uninspired nominations for Best Original Song. Last year, I used this space to gripe about the exclusion of the year’s best score due to the branch’s seemingly arbitrary rules. The entire system for determining eligibility and nominees in both music categories needs an overhaul.

However, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, and though these may not be the five nominees I would have chosen, the music nominated for Best Original Score this year is fantastic across the board. A few of the best composers working today are nominated alongside two of the best film composers of all time, and their work covers a broad spectrum from big and bombastic adventure music to subtle and subdued drama.

Unusually for this category, only one nominated film is also nominated for Best Picture. The last time that happened was in 2003 with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which went on to win the award. In fact, a Best Picture nominee has won this award every year since 2003, though interestingly only three Best Picture winners in that 12-year span have also won Best Original Score. Either way, the run of Best Picture dominance in this category seems set to end this year as the Academy may finally be ready to reward one of the giants of the craft.

The Hateful Eight – Ennio Morricone is among the most famous composers in the world, and his compositions have been repurposed in countless ways across a wide variety of mediums. The main title theme to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly might be one of the two or three most recognizable pieces of film score ever written. He has been nominated for six Oscars and received an honorary Academy Award in 2007 for his contributions to cinema.

Morricone had consciously avoided scoring westerns recently to avoid being thought of as only a western composer, and it took Quentin Tarantino to convince the Italian master to return to the genre that launched his career. The funny thing is – and Tarantino has acknowledged this in numerous interviews – Morricone pretty much avoided writing a western score. The music in The Hateful Eight sounds like it belongs in a horror movie more than a talky western.

Every element of the score oozes dread. From the sinister pounding of the drums to the whining and pulsing strings layered over it to the low-register lead, Morricone has perfectly tapped into the drawing-room mystery aspects of Tarantino’s script while bringing an unhinged energy that ultimately makes the music the best part of the film. The Hateful Eight is well liked enough by Academy members, and the season appears headed in the direction of awarding Morricone his first competitive Oscar. It would be a well-deserved and fitting honor.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens – The man who could stand in Morricone’s way, though, has been here before – more times than almost anybody. John Williams’ 50 Academy Award nominations are second only to Walt Disney for most nominations for an individual. His compositions for Jaws, Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Ark are part of the cultural heritage, and the American Film Institute named the theme to Star Wars the greatest score of all time. It does not get much more iconic than that.

If Morricone returning to the western genre is exciting, then Williams returning to the Star Wars universe is on another level. The 84-year-old Williams has reduced his work load significantly in recent years, but there is only one man for the job of composing a Star Wars soundtrack. His music for Star Wars: The Force Awakens is everything we have come to expect from Williams – big horns, driving strings, and dynamic tension between the quiet and the loud that signals adventure and mystery.

Williams has been nominated 19 times since his last win for Schindler’s List in 1993. Not among those 19 nominations are any of the Star Wars prequels, though he was nominated for each film in the original trilogy and won for A New Hope. Williams is a legend, and every single member of the Academy knows it, and it is possible that respect will carry him to a sixth Oscar.

Bridge of Spies – While Williams went off to compose the score for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Thomas Newman stepped in to fill the musical void for director Steven Spielberg on the Cold War thriller Bridge of Spies. This is the first Spielberg film in 30 years not conducted by Williams, but Newman does an admirable job of getting on Spielberg’s wavelength and finding the right tones for an old-school story of heroism in the face of insurmountable odds.

The horns and military-style drums immediately stand out, and some of the main themes feel like a throwback to some of James Horner’s early 1990s compositions for films such as Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, and Apollo 13. Newman has been nominated 12 times for Best Original Score and once for Best Original Song, but he has never won.

Newman’s compositions throughout his career have tended to be more idiosyncratic than the Academy usually likes, and his more classical work on Bridge of Spies could be right up members’ alley. That, coupled with the Best Picture nomination for the film, would make him a threat for the win in most years, but with Williams and Morricone in the picture, Newman will likely be relegated to bridesmaid status once again.

Carol – A little more than six years ago on this site, I called Carter Burwell the best composer working in Hollywood. That feels even truer today than it did then. He is my personal favorite music composer of any kind, film or not. His scores for Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, In Bruges, A Serious Man, and Where the Wild Things Are rank among my favorite albums of all time. He is best known probably for his work with the Coen Brothers – or perhaps among certain people for his Twilight scores – but his recent collaborations with director Todd Haynes on the Mildred Pierce miniseries and Carol have been equally fruitful.

For Carol, Burwell is working firmly within his favorite subgenre – off-kilter dramas about descent into darkness. The way his strings swirl around the listener while the piano holds the center together just spells gloom and madness, but it is never overbearing, which is key for a film as subtle and restrained as Carol. Burwell also introduces themes of romanticism into the score that he rarely uses but that perfectly complement the film’s thematic intent.

I am ecstatic that Burwell has received his first Oscar nomination. It is long overdue. He is unlikely to win and is probably running third or fourth in the category this year, but now that he is in the club, expect to see Burwell pop up as a perennial nominee. He will win one eventually, and when Burwell accepts his Oscar someday, that will be one of the happiest moments of my Oscar-watching life.

Sicario – Kudos to the music branch – how often do I say that? – for nominating something as strange and unsettling as Jóhann Jóhannsson’s work on Sicario. Jóhannsson earned his first Oscar nomination last year for his far more traditional score for The Theory of Everything. I had him pegged for the win last year as well, but he lost out to the overwhelming popularity of The Grand Budapest Hotel. This time, I would be shocked if Jóhannsson found himself onstage, not because the work is not deserving but because the Academy rarely goes for something this unusual in the category.

The driving percussion and punishing strings remind of Hans Zimmer’s iconic work on Inception but set in a world without hope. Amid the brutality and carnage of the U.S.-Mexico border wars, the music makes the characters’ sense of dread palpable for the audience. Deep feelings of disquiet creep into viewers minds thanks in large part to the way Jóhannsson’s score penetrates the narrative. You do not so much hear the music as feel it in your gut. That does not make it a good bet to win an Oscar, but it does make it a great score.

The final analysis

Morricone has the inside track here. Along with a Golden Globe win and general industry love, he is overdue for this honor, and voters know it. Williams could get in on sentiment, but much of the same sentiment that would drive him to a victory also holds true for Morricone. The other nominated scores are great and would be deserving winners, but a win for Morricone would be history-making, and that temptation might be too much to pass up for the Academy.

Will win: The Hateful Eight

Should win: The Hateful Eight

Should have been here: It Follows

Tomorrow: Best Sound Mixing

Thursday, February 4, 2016

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Cinematography

Director of photography Roger Deakins earned his 13th nomination for Best Cinematography for Sicario.

Best Cinematography

The nominees are:

Sicario

As I said last year, this is my favorite category, and everything I said then holds true now. I would also add cinematography might be the most democratic craft where general audiences are concerned. The average movie-goer does not necessarily know what makes for a good sound mix or whether something is well edited, but anybody can look at an image onscreen and understand its beauty. Photography is visceral. We respond to it because we feel it instinctively.

That said, it is among the most technically challenging aspects of filmmaking. Composition, depth of field, color, the interplay between light and shadow – these are intellectual, artistic pursuits. Only the masters can make it seem as easy as pointing a camera and rolling film. The audience feels the image because of the care and effort that went into creating it. Few use greater care or put forth more effort than these five nominees.

The Revenant – The images Emmanuel Lubezki captures boggle the mind. The ways his camera moves through space, frames action, and observes stillness are on a level we have never seen. I would call him the best cinematographer alive today if not for the fact I think he has a legitimate claim as the best of all time. A quick greatest hits from the man they call Chivo: Sleepy Hollow, The New World, Children of Men, The Tree of Life, Gravity, Birdman, and now The Revenant. Every frame from every one of those films could hang in a museum.

Perhaps it sounds like I am overstating his brilliance, but I promise the modern history of cinema will not be written without mentioning Lubezki. His work has always been otherworldly, but his two collaborations with director Alejandro González Iñárritu, Birdman and The Revenant, have changed the way we think about the art form. The Revenant is composed of a series of gorgeous gray and white tableaux that evoke the primal forces of nature in their grandeur and objectivity. Lubezki has no rival, and The Revenant has no equal this year in cinematography.

Lubezki has been nominated nine times and won twice – of course, he should have won at least twice more. His two wins have come in the last two years for Gravity and Birdman, making him only the fourth person in history to win consecutive cinematography Oscars. No one has done it three times, but this work and this artist might just break that streak. The only person standing in the way is the next nominee on our list.

Mad Max: Fury Road – John Seale retired a few years ago with a résumé that included four Oscar nominations and one win for The English Patient, as well as countless other popular and critical hits. His legacy was secure, and he could have left it at that. Instead, he let George Miller talk him back to work for the gonzo action epic Mad Max: Fury Road. Thank god he did because the 73-year-old director of photography brings to the film the energy and nihilism of someone 50 years younger but the skill of a craftsman who has been in this game forever.

When you watch Mad Max: Fury Road, the first thing you notice is the color. The hyper-saturated vistas of Miller’s post-apocalyptic wasteland are absolutely striking. Never has a desert been so orange, and at night, you never saw the earth so blue. It is audacious and bold and innovative in ways lesser filmmakers would shy away from, but Miller provides the canvas, and Seale paints the picture. Whether Seale will win the Oscar this year is an open question, but our victory as an audience is simply that he came back for one last ride – and on a war rig, no less.

Carol – Ed Lachman may not be the star the rest of the nominees in this category are this year, but his chameleon-like adaptability behind the camera has made him the perfect fit for genre-hopping director Todd Haynes. Every time they come back together, Lachman seems inspired to push his work in new, exciting directions. Beginning with the Sirkian melodrama Far From Heaven and onto the Bob Dylan biopic as experimental art film I’m Not There and cable miniseries Mildred Pierce, Lachman always seems to find new notes to play for Haynes.

So it is with their latest collaboration, Carol, a 1950s-set romance that is thematically similar to their previous work but as stylistically different as can be. Since the story is set primarily in New York City, Lachman has license to go darker and dirtier than one typically would expect for the era being depicted. This world feels lived in, and Lachman constantly obscures the frame with rain or curtains or windows or all three to suggest the hidden lives of the characters, the lives nobody sees or wants to see.

Sicario – Twelve previous nominations for Roger Deakins and no wins. This is his 13th nod, and he will not win this one either, putting him in a tie with the late George Folsey for Oscar futility in this category. To nominate him that many times, his fellow cinematographers must respect him beyond belief, and that respect is due, but the Academy as a whole simply has never been willing to go there. For actors and directors who get repeated nominations without winning, there is often a groundswell of support as members rally behind the artist and finally award him or her. That does not seem to be true for craftspeople such as Deakins.

The work itself this year, well, of course it is awesome. This is the fourth consecutive year Deakins has received a nomination, and Sicario is the best work he has done of the bunch. The night-vision sequence alone is enough to leave even accomplished filmmakers scratching their heads and wondering how it was done. Deakins uses shadows and silhouette the way musicians use silence, finding meaning in the emptiness. It is truly fine work and Deakins’ best probably since the one-two punch of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country for Old Men in 2007, but it still is only the third- or fourth-best nominated work this year.

The Hateful Eight – Like Lubezki and Deakins, Robert Richardson is a giant of cinematography. His work with Oliver Stone (10 films, three nominations, one Oscar) and Martin Scorsese (four films, two nominations, two Oscars) would be enough to secure his place in the canon. Yet, his collaborations with Quentin Tarantino are likely the films for which he will be most remembered – five films, three nominations, no Oscar yet.

Richardson has proved to be the ideal director of photography to capture Tarantino’s twin loves of American westerns and martial arts films. If you ask me, Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2 constitute a crowning achievement in paying homage to a genre while establishing a unique voice outside the genre’s confines. Go figure, those are the only two films together for which Richardson was not nominated.

The Hateful Eight is a grand experiment in bringing a long-dormant film process back to life, glorious Ultra Panavision 70, as it was billed. It lives up to that billing in the movie’s opening sequences, set amid a blizzard in the mountains of Wyoming. However, when the film moves indoors for the last two hours and 20 minutes or so of its three-hour runtime, the wider frame loses some of its punch. The nomination is a nice bit of recognition from fellow cinematographers, but I doubt if the work will do much for the rest of the Academy when put up against this list of nominees.

The final analysis

Mad Max: Fury Road or The Revenant, flip a coin. The Academy likes its winners to be pretty, innovative, or both. That sounds more like The Revenant, but I have this nagging feeling that voters will be reluctant to award Lubezki for a third straight year. The work certainly deserves it, but with a viable alternative and a great story in Seale, it is just as possible members go that direction.

Carol and Lachman would be the likely beneficiary of a split vote between the top two films, and Lachman received the lion’s share of critical plaudits this season, though most of those awards came before The Revenant had screened. In the end, I am predicting Lubezki will pick up his third in a row because it is the film more Academy members are likely to have watched, and to watch it is to be in awe of it.

Will win: The Revenant

Should win: The Revenant

Should be here: The Tribe

Tomorrow: Best Editing