Countdown to the Oscars: Best Makeup and Hairstyling

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is probably this year's strangest nominee.

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 Makeup and Hairstyling

The nominees are:

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Revenant

One really has to hand it to the makeup and hairstyling branch of the Academy. Last year, I listed a few of its more outré selections from past years. Allow me to name a few more: Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, and Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. That last one, by the way, was nominated alongside The Color Purple, and they both lost to Mask. Idiosyncratic is one word for it. Daffy might be another, but few among the nominees could be considered without merit.

To its eternal credit, the makeup and hairstyling branch just likes good work and will embrace films the rest of the Academy would not touch with a 10-foot pole. That is not to say prestige films never get nominated here. It happens all the time, and in fact, this year’s two nominations leaders are among the three selected films here. The third nominee is a different story altogether.

Now, about that 10-foot pole – the branch can nominate whatever it likes and usually does, but it is the Academy as a whole that votes for the winner. Films with high nominations totals tend to have a leg up here, especially those nominated for Best Picture. In fact, no Best Picture nominee has lost in this category since 2003, when Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World lost to eventual Best Picture winner The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. The same dynamic is most likely to play out this year, unless the weirdest of this bunch surprises everyone.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared – If you could not tell just from that title, this is the outlier nominee. You may never have heard of it, but it is the highest grossing film in Swedish history. With $51 million in the bank, it actually has made more worldwide than three of this year’s Best Picture nominees. So, though we may find it strange, just know there are people in Sweden wondering how this film earned only one nomination.

“What is it?” you ask. It is about a 100-year-old man with an affinity for blowing things up who escapes his stifling nursing home and goes on a road trip through the Swedish countryside. Along the way, we learn about his insane life, which includes meeting various dictators and presidents, working on the Manhattan Project, and just generally raising hell and changing the course of modern history. It is kind of like Forrest Gump and The Bucket List wrapped into one darkly funny Swedish film.

Its inclusion in this category is owed entirely to the branch’s deep and abiding love for old-age makeup. They cannot get enough of watching younger actors transform into older people. Recent victories for The Grand Budapest Hotel, Les Miserables, and The Iron Lady, as well as nominations for films such as Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa and Il Divo, stand as testament to this. Lead actor Robert Gustafsson reportedly spent around three weeks’ worth of production time just having makeup applied and removed, and he does creditably play a man aging from about 30 years old to 100.

Makeup designer Love Larson previously worked on the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy and its American remake, while co-nominee makeup designer Eva Von Bahr also worked on the remake. Both are first-time nominees, and though the work is stellar, should their names be called out, they will constitute two of the most shocking first-time winners in recent memory.

Mad Max: Fury Road – Back to a film we should all be familiar with by now, Mad Max: Fury Road has a lot of showy makeup and prosthetics work, particularly in its sequences at the Citadel and in Immortan Joe’s lair, home to freaks a traveling sideshow would be loath to put on display. However, there is also a lot of subtle, world-building work in the bruised, battered, and dirty faces of the main characters who have traveled a long way through hell but still have a ways to go.

Lesley Vanderwalt, Elka Wardega, and Damian Martin are all first-time nominees. Makeup and hairstyle designer Vanderwalt has worked extensively in Australian cinema, having been part of several Baz Luhrman productions, as well as director George Miller’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and Happy Feet. Meanwhile, Vardega and Martin have experience primarily with big-budget fantasy-adventure films such as two of the Star Wars prequels (Martin) and The Chronicles of Narnia trilogy (Vardega).

The Revenant – That nominees Sian Grigg and Duncan Jarman are listed in the credits as “personal make-up artist and prosthetic make-up effects for Leonardo DiCaprio” tells you pretty much everything you need to know about what got this film nominated here. Through the course of the film, DiCaprio’s character is beat up, bloodied, and broken, and it falls to Grigg and Jarman to portray the trauma and transformation convincingly, primarily as it concerns the wounds Hugh Glass suffers in the bear attack.

Grigg has been DiCaprio’s makeup artist on every film the actor has done since 2000, while Jarman worked on The Beach, The Aviator, Body of Lies, and J. Edgar with DiCaprio. Hair stylist Robert Pandini, who is nominated with Grigg and Jarman, has spent most of his career working in television or science fiction or both, having contributed to most of season three of The X-Files. Pandini may just be along for the ride based on the makeup effects, but his work on The Revenant is subtle and layered in ways that enhance the film.

The final analysis

In some categories in which Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant are matched against each other, there is the possibility for a split vote that would allow a third contender to slip through to the win. That is not the case here. Those two may split the vote, but they will also garner about 98 percent of it, making the split something like 49-49-2. Hopefully, just from the nomination, more people will check out The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. It is streaming on Amazon Prime now, and I cannot recommend it highly enough for a daft, delightful experience. As for the winner here, Mad Max: Fury Road probably takes this both for having the most makeup and the makeup that best helps create the world of the story.

Will win: Mad Max: Fury Road

Should win: Mad Max: Fury Road

Should have been here: Crimson Peak

Tomorrow: Best Original Song

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Makeup and Hairstyling

The Grand Budapest Hotel is the likely frontrunner for the Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

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 Makeup and Hairstyling

The nominees are:

Foxcatcher

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Guardians of the Galaxy

Just about every year, there is grumbling about this category, and the complaints usually go something like this: The Academy Awards are the prestige film awards the world over, they should honor the best the film world has to offer, and under no circumstances should a film like Norbit end up anywhere near the Oscar ceremony. This logic is flawed in so many ways, but it is a topic that comes up all the time.

Yes, films such as Norbit, The Lone Ranger, Click, and Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa can call themselves Academy Award nominated, and something like The Nutty Professor (1996) can even slap “Oscar winner” on the DVD cover if someone in the marketing department so chooses, all thanks to this category. You know what? That is awesome.

I mentioned before how the cinematographers’ branch is willing to look outside the box for nominees. Well, meet the poster child branch for that idea. Prestige does not get an automatic pass. It is about the quality of the work and nothing else, which is as it should be. Also, I like to think about it this way: For every The Nutty Professor, there is an Oscar for The Fly or An American Werewolf in London. Sounds just fine to me.

In any event, no such complaints should be heard this year as all three nominated films are critically well regarded successes of one kind or another. Unlike many years in which there is a lone nominee in the category, all of this year’s contenders popped up in at least one other category, suggesting widespread love for each of them. The Academy tends to like old-age makeup, and barring the kind of transformative creature effects of someone like Rick Baker, they tend to reward the film with the most prestige that also features the most makeup, which brings us to our frontrunner.

The Grand Budapest Hotel – Though clearly well liked by the Academy as a whole, this is a bit of a surprise nominee, given the more flashy contenders such as Maleficent and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I that were left on the sidelines. Still, now that it is on the shortlist, it is in the driver’s seat for this award. It is the most nominated film of the bunch, it is a Best Picture nominee, and the work is impeccable.

This is Frances Hannon’s first nomination, but partner Mark Coulier is a previous winner in this category for helping turn Meryl Streep into Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. The old-age makeup on Tilda Swinton in this film is as transformative, if not more so. Swinton is unrecognizable as Madame D., the elderly woman having an affair with Ralph Fienne’s concierge M. Gustave. Her hair is huge, her skin is sagging and wrinkled, and yet we never once question the reality of the transformation.

In addition, Hannon and Coulier do much more subtle work throughout the film, particularly on Fiennes and Willem Dafoe’s Jopling, a hired thug with distinctively bad teeth. To me, as good as the work on Swinton is, it is the Fiennes makeup that impresses most. He is an aesthete to his core. There is neither a blemish on his skin nor a hair out of place on his head. The makeup goes a long way toward creating the character Fiennes so well embodies.

Guardians of the Galaxy – If the award were for most makeup, this would win in a walk. Alas, it is not, but the makeup concocted by Elizabeth Yianni-Georgiou and David White goes a long way toward grounding many of the film’s more fantastical beings in a believable reality. Main characters such as Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Drax (Dave Bautista) can exist in this world as a green woman and a blue man covered in tattoos, respectively, because the universe they inhabit allows for it. Yianni-Georgiu and White’s work is partly to thank for that.

According to the film’s star, Chris Pratt, Bautista’s makeup took up to five hours daily to apply and another hour and a half to remove, a process that included applying and removing 18 prosthetic tattoo pieces. The effort shows up on screen as Drax appears as a fully formed character before he even speaks a word, just judging by the lifetime of tattoos he has acquired. For Gamora, the look of Saldana’s character is created almost entirely through makeup, a tremendous commitment by both the actor and the crew to a project that often as not is completed through CGI these days.

Foxcatcher – That nose. There is actually a ton of great, subtle makeup and hairstyling work in this film, but I promise the only thing anyone remembers is the prosthetic nose worn by Steve Carell as John du Pont. If I am being honest – and I have no reason to lie to you fine folks – I found the nose distracting. There is a great exchange in Ocean’s Thirteen in which Matt Damon, who is wearing a fake nose as part of a con, defends his choice as “not just a prop for prop’s sake.” Carell’s performance is too good to hide behind a fake nose. It is a prop for prop’s sake.

The shame is that the rest of the makeup and hairstyling in the film is incredible, from the cauliflower ears on wrestling brothers Mark (Channing Tatum) and David Schultz (Mark Ruffalo) to the ghostly pallor of du Pont’s skin. Makeup artists Bill Corso, a previous Oscar winner for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Dennis Liddiard do an amazing job of bringing three very real people to the screen. It would be a disservice to their accomplishment to boil it down to a big nose, but to be fair, it is a damn big nose.

The final analysis

Ultimately, any one of these three films could win, and each would be deserving to one extent or another, but the overall support for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel will probably be enough to carry the day here. Guardians of the Galaxy is a definite challenger just based on the sheer amount of effort that shows through on screen, and Foxcatcher is probably bringing up the rear, which is simply an indication of the high quality on display in the category this year.

Will win: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Should win: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wish it had been here: Noah