Last Cinema Standing

Sunday, February 5, 2017

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Sofia Boutella in Star Trek Beyond, nominated for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

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 Makeup and Hairstyling

The nominees are:

A Man Called Ove

Star Trek Beyond

Suicide Squad

God bless this branch. The makeup artists and hairstylists who nominate these films do not give a toss what anyone thinks of their nominations. I say it every year, but it bears repeating: For this branch, these nominations are about the quality of the work, nothing more and nothing less. It is an art about which I know little – except to say old-age Leonardo DiCaprio in J. Edgar: pretty good; old-age Armie Hammer in J. Edgar: pretty bad – but it still is among my favorite categories just for its unbridled strangeness.

Two years ago, in the inaugural edition of this column, I listed some of the odd, awful, and out-of-left-field contenders this category has produced. I did the same last year. In that spirit, let’s see if I can conjure a few more names to add to our list of films you would never guess are Oscar-nominated. Keep in mind, the award has only been around since about 1981, so eventually I will run out of titles, but not yet. How about: The Clan of the Cave Bear; Bicentennial Man; and Albert Nobbs?

Idiosyncratic as ever, this is the first time since 2011 there is no Best Picture nominee in the lineup. In each of those previous four years, a Best Picture nominee took home the prize, most likely because the Academy, unlike the makeup branch, will vote for the movie it likes best. This helps explain a win like The Iron Lady, for which Meryl Streep also won Best Actress. This year pits two mega-hit franchise films with just this single nomination against a popular Swedish indie that is also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. So, yeah, this branch goes its own way.

A Man Called Ove – Filling a niche the Academy probably did not know existed, A Man Called Ove represents the second straight year in which an oddball Swedish film featuring extensive old-age makeup has found its way into the lineup. To make the final three, it bested fellow finalists Deadpool, The Dressmaker, Florence Foster Jenkins, and Hail, Caesar!, any of which the Academy at large is more likely to have seen. Perhaps its inclusion here says more about its chances in the Foreign Language category than vice versa.

To be sure, its inclusion here is not as out of left field as last year’s nomination for the delightful Swedish blockbuster The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. While A Man Called Ove is a fine film, more about which we will discuss later in this series, it does not reach the heights of its fellow nominees in the makeup and hairstyling department. It is admirable the transformation the film’s star, Rolf Lassgård, undergoes to become Ove, but the scale of the work simply does not compare here. Of course, how could it?

Makeup designers Love Larson and Eva Von Bahr were nominated for their work last year on The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, and they are operating in much the same territory here. There is never a moment where the much younger-looking actor Lassgård looks like anything other than the elderly, pudgy Ove. The work is seamless in close-ups and under certain extreme conditions. It is to be applauded, but it lacks, by design, the grandeur and scope of the other two nominees.

Star Trek Beyond – For scope and grandeur in this category, you cannot beat Star Trek Beyond. Director Justin Lin’s film simply could not exist without its special makeup effects. Background characters in this world feature the kind of makeup effects that would win awards in other years. The various alien and mutant creatures that populate the Star Trek universe are a veritable playground for makeup artists, and they have made good use of it throughout the years. This is the fourth film of the various Star Trek franchises to receive a nomination in this category, and it won the award last time out.

Special makeup effects artist Joel Harlow, who has been Johnny Depp’s personal makeup artist for about a decade now, won an Oscar for the 2009 Star Trek reboot and previously was nominated for Depp starrer The Lone Ranger. This is Richard Alonzo’s first nomination, though he did work as a makeup artist on the 2009 Star Trek. The pair’s makeup and prosthetics work here is remarkable, particularly for the villain Krall (Idris Elba) and the Enterprise team’s new partner Jaylah (Sofia Boutella).

Suicide Squad – It has some competition, but there is a good chance this is the worst film nominated for an Academy Award this year. Suicide Squad is just the fourth comic-book superhero movie cited in this category, joining Batman Returns, The Dark Knight, and Guardians of the Galaxy. Note the presence of Batman – the greatest superhero – in three of the four and the fact none of the four has ever won this award.

The Academy does not care much for superhero movies, perhaps thinking they signal the death of the cinema – and if any does, it is Suicide Squad – but it would be a mistake to discount the dirty-old-man factor. The Academy, despite reform efforts, still is made up of mostly older, mostly white men who simply may enjoy watching Margot Robbie – who, to take nothing away from her, is quite good if badly underutilized for her acting in the film. Of course, if Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman didn’t do it …

All that aside, you cannot fault this branch for appreciating the work of first-time nominees makeup and hair designer Alessandro Bertolazzi, wig supervisor Giorgio Gregorini, and Christopher Allen Nelson, who is credited as department head for the Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) effects makeup. Killer Croc arguably is the film’s greatest achievement, but the wigs and makeup for Harley Quinn (Robbie) and the outstanding tattoo work on Diablo (Jay Hernandez) are also of particular note.

The final analysis

Take your pick. There is no real precedent to which to point. The Academy likes popular films and popular people. While Suicide Squad is the biggest box-office hit of the bunch, members may be reticent to hand a trophy to a film that is so poorly regarded. A Man Called Ove is the only multiple nominee named here, but its work pales next to the other two and it may not have been seen by enough of the Academy. That leaves Star Trek Beyond as the safe, middle-ground choice – a highly successful entry in a franchise that always does well in this category.

Will win: Star Trek Beyond

Should win: Star Trek Beyond

Should have been here: The Dressmaker

Tomorrow: Best Visual Effects

Saturday, February 4, 2017

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Costume Design

Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie, nominated for Best Costume Design.

Best Costume Design

The nominees are:

Allied

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Florence Foster Jenkins

Jackie

La La Land

An interesting divergence has taken place in this category the last 10 or so years. From 1996-2003, six of the eight winners in this category also won Best Picture. Since then, only one of 12 has taken home both awards, The Artist in 2011. What’s more, the eventual Best Picture winner has earned a nomination in only two of those 12 years with The King’s Speech in 2010 joining The Artist on that list.

It poses the question: What has caused this shift? The answer seems to be the Academy started in 2004 rewarding a different type of film for Best Picture. Instead of big, costume epics like Shakespeare in Love, Gladiator, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, smaller, more intimate human dramas such as Million Dollar Baby, Crash, and The Hurt Locker started winning the top prize. Great films all, but hard to site for their costume work.

How this shift took place is harder to say and probably a question for another day. The point as it pertains to today’s column is Costume Design has become something of a wild card at the Oscars. The Academy’s fickle tastes have taken it everywhere from Wonderland to 1920s Hollywood to post-apocalyptic Australia. You just do not know what is going to happen, except in a year like this, when you think you do.

La La Land – La La Land joins a long list of musicals to find favor in this category – just in the past few years, Into the Woods, Les Miserables, and Nine, among others – but it is a rare bird in that its plumage is contemporary. We talked a lot yesterday about anti-contemporary bias in Production Design, but it is nearly as bad in the Costume Design category. However, La La Land engenders such love it makes one overlook such issues.

Costume designer Mary Zophres could just as easily and probably ought to have been a double nominee for this and her remarkable work on Joel and Ethan Coen’s Hail, Caesar!. Zophres has worked with the Coens since 1996, when she designed the costumes for Fargo, and she earned her only previous nomination for their True Grit in 2010. Her designs here are a classic movie musical look – repeating patterns, color for character, and a generally light, breezy Southern California chic, all the better for dancing. She is perfectly keyed in to writer-director Damien Chazelle’s aesthetic, and her work seamlessly contributes to the film’s effortless flow.

Jackie – Jacqueline Kennedy is the kind of character that sucks all the air out of a room. Her presence alone demands attention. She is, of course, the center of attention in this eponymous film. What becomes interesting in watching Jackie, which concerns mostly the days surrounding John F. Kennedy’s assassination, is how impossible it is to change one’s aura. Even mired in the worst tragedy of her life, Jackie Kennedy cannot help but embody the Jacqueline Kennedy image.

Among everything else she was, she was a style icon, and that is not lost on the filmmakers, including necessarily costume designer Madeline Fontaine. This is Fontaine’s first Oscar nomination, though she is highly regarded in France, where she has been nominated for eight Caesar Awards (the French Oscars) and won two. She does not shy away from the Jacqueline Kennedy iconography and plays instead on everything we think we know about the First Lady. An interesting side note: One of Fontaine’s earliest gigs as costume designer was for a little-seen French film called Kennedy et Moi, which tells of a French writer who becomes obsessed with John F. Kennedy.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – One place where this spinoff film has a leg up on its parent franchise, at least in terms of potential Oscar recognition here, is in its setting. While the Harry Potter series is set in a magical version of our world, the contemporary styles sported by most of the leads did little to distinguish their characters. Only the first film in the franchise, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Philosopher’s Stone for my non-American friends), garnered recognition for its costumes. On the other hand, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them benefits from its 1920s New York City setting, giving the costume department lots of room to play and experiment.

It also helps to have costume designer extraordinaire Colleen Atwood on your side. Atwood has 12 Academy Award nominations to her name, and she has won three times, for Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Alice in Wonderland. A legend in the industry and beloved by her peers, Atwood can never be counted out for a win, and her work here blending the drab realities of 1920s New York with the magical alternate reality certainly is deserving.

Florence Foster Jenkins – It is undeniable Meryl Streep goes through a lot of costume changes in this movie. The high-society music maven loved her outlandish clothes as much as she loved to sing, and her self-confident flamboyance in both arenas would be difficult to match. Ms. Jenkins did nothing small, and her fashions were no different. The sheer volume of costumes in this film makes it an easy play for the Academy, featuring in addition to the dozens of Streep wardrobes, numerous scenes of halls packed with music patrons all dressed to the nines in the fashions of the day (mid-1940s).

Nominated costume designer Consolata Boyle has developed something of a specialty designing for strong, steadfast, older women. Her one previous nomination came for The Queen, which she followed later with The Iron Lady, Philomena, and Florence Foster Jenkins. Next on the docket is Victoria and Abdul, featuring Judi Dench as Queen Victoria, so you know, well on brand. Boyle’s work here is, as ever, solid, but it suffers from comparison to the more nuanced, thematically rich designs of its fellow nominees.

Allied – As classic a nominee as you will find in this category this year, Robert Zemeckis’ World War II spy thriller is a throwback in every way. It is shooting for Casablanca-style romantic grandeur, and while its charismatic leads (Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard) do a lot of heavy lifting, they cannot make up for the film’s flimsy plot and unearned drama. Whatever story failures the film has, though, Zemeckis is nothing if not an expert world builder when it comes to crafts, bringing on some of the best in the business to design his universes.

Costume designer Joanna Johnston is one of his most frequent collaborators, and for folks of a certain age, she is a designer of dreams. The self-tying Nikes and self-adjusting jacket in Back to the Future Part II? Johnston. The pulpy noir threads of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Johnston. Forrest Gump’s iconic white suit? Johnston. She also took a turn at Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and helped Steven Spielberg storm Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan.

Remarkably, she has been nominated only once before, for Spielberg’s Lincoln. Her designs for Allied are sleek, memorable, and instantly recognizable within the film’s aesthetic, simultaneously calling out for attention and blending back into the narrative.

The final analysis

I made the mistake last year of believing the flashiest work would win out over the crafts juggernaut. If a film has momentum, that is all it really takes to overcome whatever preconceived notions or biases the Academy may have. That means while something like Allied or Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them could and likely would win this category in another year, you cannot stop a moving train. La La Land is that train, and it will scoop this award up along the tracks.

Will win: La La Land

Should win: Jackie:

Should have been here: The Dressmaker

Tomorrow: Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Friday, February 3, 2017

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Production Design

The film within the film in Hail, Caesar!, nominated for Best Production Design.

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

Thursday, February 2, 2017

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Editing

Andrew Garfield stars in Hacksaw Ridge, which is nominated for Best Editing.

Best Editing

The nominees are:

Arrival

Hacksaw Ridge

Hell or High Water

La La Land

Moonlight

In general, the Academy likes to see its crafts up on the screen. The movies that win in the below-the-line categories are often the biggest, the boldest, or the flashiest in the bunch, which usually makes it easy to pick a winner. When it comes to nominations, this maxim often holds true as well. However, the editors branch can be more particular, more discerning in its tastes. Oh, they go for flashy as often as the Academy at large, but they also fall for far subtler work that would likely miss the eye of a non-expert in the field.

Smaller human dramas such as Spotlight last year and Dallas Buyers Club three years ago, as well as Moonlight this year, can garner a nomination in this category. This is because editors can see the work their fellow craftspeople put into building stories and characters scene by scene, shot by shot, and frame by frame. These movies rarely threaten for the win because those outside the craft may be hard-pressed to identify the nuances of the work, but the nominations reflect a willingness within the branch to look closer and really consider what “best” means.

While the five nominees this year all come from the Best Picture lineup, the two awards are no longer as closely linked as they once were since Best Picture expanded beyond five nominees. In the seven years since that change, only two films have won both awards, whereas in the seven years prior, they matched five of seven times. With that in mind, this is an interesting year because the presumed Best Picture frontrunner and potential crafts juggernaut does not feature the flashiest work in this category. That belongs to our first nominee below.

Hacksaw Ridge – This film was a dicey proposition for a couple reasons. First, there are the obvious and legitimate concerns about honoring a film by an artist as troubled as Mel Gibson, an issue we will discuss at greater length later this month. However, this is also a war film about a pacifist, leaving potential audiences to wonder just how exciting a film with such a description could possibly be. The answer: remarkably so. Hacksaw Ridge builds to become one of the most harrowing portraits of war this side of the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan.

Nominated editor John Gilbert uses the natural rhythms of battle to create a push-and-pull dynamic that leaves the viewer breathless. As soon as the characters have a quiet moment to reflect on their predicament – and to let the viewer catch up – the next brutal reminder of war and its carnage is at hand. Gilbert is a previous nominee for his work on The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and while this cannot match that film’s epic scale, it more than exceeds it for emotional intensity. What is most impressive, perhaps, are the cuts Gilbert chooses not to make, letting moments linger so that the audience can engage in the full depths of what we are witnessing.

Hell or High Water – Director David Mackenzie’s southern bank robbers saga is a thriller of the highest order. From its opening tracking shot to is elegiac epilogue, we know we are in the hands of a master storyteller. The world of the film is so well established at every step the audience is never left fishing for answers about motivations or logic. It is spelled out and plainspoken like the characters the story portrays. Hell or High Water is a heart-pounding tale that lets off the gas at just the right moments to delve into the humanity and loss that exist at its core.

Jake Roberts is a first-time nominee who made his name in European character dramas such as Starred Up and Riot Club, but his best-known previous work is probably last year’s Best Picture-nominated romance Brooklyn. This brand of storytelling is 180 degrees from anything like Roberts’ previous work, but he adapts his style wonderfully to the rhythms and cadences of the American southwest. With two other films likely leading the way in this category, Roberts could end up the beneficiary of a split vote and surprise with a win, which would be wholly deserved.

La La Land – Even if we accept the term “musical” as a relatively nebulous concept, I think we are safe in saying no musical has won this award since Chicago in 2002 and before that All That Jazz in 1979. Depending on your definition, no musical has even been nominated for this award since Walk the Line in 2005. However, when your film carries the record-tying nominations haul of writer-director Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, precedents are bound to fall.

Editor Tom Cross is the only previous winner nominated this year, having taken home the award for his only previous nomination, Chazelle’s last film, Whiplash. Interestingly, like that earlier collaboration, La La Land builds to an emotionally powerful climax that is a masterclass in montage, worthy of recognition in its own right. However, while that sequence rightly calls attention to itself, much of Cross’ best work in the film is seamless like the “single” take song-and-dance number that opens the film, which is in fact several shorter takes stitched together. From beginning to end, Cross is integral to every step of the film’s success.

Arrival – A movie that is ultimately about how we experience time was bound to be a tricky feat of editing. Editor Joe Walker and director Denis Villeneuve step up to the challenge, employing a series of flash-forwards, flashbacks, and flashbacks within flash-forwards to establish the circular nature of the film’s storytelling. There is no linear way to tell this story, and Walker embraces that as an opportunity to find new ways to shepherd the audience through the film’s vertiginous narrative.

Walker was previously nominated for his work on Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave and probably just missed out on a nomination last year for the drug-war thriller Sicario. Villeneuve also brought Walker on board for his Blade Runner sequel, Blade Runner 2049, due out later this year. Walker’s gift with Arrival is to take a story that could be too twisty or involuted in less capable hands and to make it palatable and comprehensible without sacrificing its quintessentially loopy plot.

Moonlight – We talked yesterday about Bradford Young becoming the first black American nominated for Best Cinematography by the Academy, and today, we shift to another bit of history. Joi McMillon is the first black woman nominated for Best Editing. Another barrier broken, and yet still more to fall. McMillon is joined in the nomination by co-editor Nat Sanders. Both are first-time nominees, and both were students with writer-director Barry Jenkins at Florida State film school.

Much attention has been paid to the emotional reality of Moonlight and the way it maintains the truth at the core of its characters over the 20-plus years the story takes place. Credit due of course to the wonderful script and performances, but it becomes McMillon’s and Sanders’ task to find and establish the thread that carries the film from start to finish. This is easily the subtlest work of the nominees and, therefore, the least likely winner, but Moonlight does not become the remarkable film it is without the contributions of McMillon and Sanders.

The final analysis

The America Cinema Editors guild, which overlaps with the editors branch of the Academy, named its winners last week, awarding La La Land in its comedy category and Arrival in its drama category. While La La Land was not up against any of its fellow nominees here, Arrival beat out the other three Oscar nominees – Hacksaw Ridge, Hell or High Water, and Moonlight. That would seem to position La La Land and Arrival against each other for the win.

However, the members of the editors guild are almost certainly more likely to recognize the degree of difficulty in editing Arrival than the Academy at large, who may be more wooed by the bolder strokes of Hacksaw Ridge. Ultimately – and you may as well get used to hearing this now – the award is La La Land’s to lose, and I would not bet on it losing.

Will win: La La Land

Should win: Hacksaw Ridge

Should have been here: O.J.: Made in America

Tomorrow: Best Production Design

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Cinematography

Andrew Garfield and Yosuke Kubozua in Silence, nominated for Best Cinematography.

Best Cinematography

The nominees are:

Arrival

La La Land

Lion

Moonlight

Silence

Only one thing is for certain this year. Emmanuel Lubezki will not win his fourth consecutive Oscar. That is only because he was not invited to the party this year. Likely, the only reason he was not invited to the party is because he did not have a film released this year. Otherwise, the world’s greatest living cinematographer probably would be competing for his fourth Academy Award. There is always next year.

In addition, for the first time since 2012, legend Roger Deakins did not earn a nomination. Robert Richardson, who has been nominated in three of the previous five years, is not on this list. Neither does Bruno Delbonnel nor Janusz Kamiński appear. In fact, only Silence lenser Rodrigo Prieto has been to the Oscars as a nominee before, in 2005 with Brokeback Mountain.

That means the field is composed of Prieto and four first-time nominees, an unusual circumstance for this branch, which has its favorite cinematographers and tends to nominate them time and again. However, what these nominees lack in familiarity, they more than make up for in clear talent and wonderful execution. Every one of these films is a deserving nominee, and any would make a lasting, impressive winner.

Silence – Just because Lubezki will not be winning another Oscar this year does not mean a longtime collaborator of director Alejandro González Iñárritu will not. Prieto, in fact, shot every one of Iñárritu’s features until he was supplanted by Lubezki. It is perhaps unfair, though, to speak of Prieto only in the context of his collaborators and colleagues because he is a wonderful director of photography whose work speaks for itself in films such as Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman, and his previous collaboration with Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street.

This time around, Scorsese and Prieto pull out all the stops. From the foggy beachside vistas to the shadowy, claustrophobic prisons, there is not a frame of this film that is not picture-perfect. The film, however, is not only naturalistic but impressionistic as well. It is an odyssey of faith and inner turmoil, and Prieto is unafraid to take his camera inside the characters’ minds and give the audience the subjective experience of the story. The pains and tortures suffered by many of the characters are unimaginable, and Prieto does not shy from putting us directly in their shoes.

On sheer beauty alone, Prieto would win the award walking away for his tremendous work, but Silence did not catch on with voters. Prieto is the film’s sole nominee, alone carrying the banner for another Scorsese masterwork. Perhaps the subject matter was too difficult or the length off-putting, but for whatever reason, the Academy did not embrace one of Scorsese’s best, most human films. Prieto’s work, on the other hand, was too great to ignore, and good on the cinematographers branch for recognizing as much.

La La Land – Lovely like a postcard you want to send to all your friends and family, La La Land’s 14 nominations mean I will be talking about it a lot in this space. I will try to avoid repeating myself where possible, but I apologize here at the beginning if I make the same or similar points more than once through this series. Swedish lenser Linus Sandgren is relatively green, and this is just his ninth feature film credit, though he has filmed David O. Russell’s last two pictures – American Hustle and Joy. The effect he captures here is, in a word one hears a lot associated with this film, magical.

For a film about dreamers and their dreams, Sandgren goes to great lengths to infuse every shot with a dreamlike, stars-out-at-dusk feeling. Characters seem to float through this movie, and Sandgren evokes that weightlessness through his fluid camerawork and surreally saturated color palate. This does not reflect the real Los Angeles, or indeed the real Hollywood, as anyone who has visited will attest, and Sandgren rightly does not impose the grittiness it might be natural to capture form the city. La La Land gives us a fantastical wonderland, and Sandgren proves a more-than-capable documenter of a world we may only be able to visit in dreams.

Moonlight – The opening shot of Moonlight is virtuosic as cinematographer James Laxton loops us through a dizzying, disorienting series of 360-degree swings all in a single unbroken take, introducing to the poor Miami neighborhood that will be its own character in the film. It is a bit like the twister in The Wizard of Oz, funneling us violently but not haphazardly into an unfamiliar world. It is not the only unbroken take we will see in the film, but what could be and often is a gimmick in lesser hands becomes a statement of purpose in writer-director Barry Jenkins’ emotionally engaging and morally probing film.

The frames practically drip with authenticity, vibrantly bringing to life the Miami main character Chiron (Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, Trevante Rhodes) experiences. From its bursts of color to the off-kilter lighting schemes, Moonlight looks like no other coming-of-age drama out there. Laxton’s use of shadows only emphasizes the differences and inequities that get brought into the light. So many of these characters are either hiding or hidden from us, but Jenkins and Laxton use all their photographic tricks and techniques to force the audience to consider what we often cannot see – or sometimes choose not to see.

Lion – Australian lenser Greig Fraser’s work on director Garth Davis’ heart-wrenching drama is superb, but it will not – no matter how successful Lion becomes – be Fraser’s most widely seen work this year. That distinction, without question, goes to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, on which Fraser also served as director of photography. The stark photographic contrast between the two films is informative because it shows Fraser’s remarkable range and adaptability. Rogue One alone contains within it several distinct styles – war film, space opera, dark fantasy – and Fraser’s clever manipulations are key to making the movie’s wild tonal shifts feel of a piece.

That is not, however, the work for which he is cited here. Instead, his subtle, impressionistic touch in bringing to life the twin worlds of Lion garnered him this recognition. A moody, disorienting film about love, loss, and finding your place, Fraser’s camera takes on the weight of Saroo’s (Sunny Pawar, Dev Patel) struggle and makes us feel every moment of his displacement. He creates separate and distinct moods for the film’s India and Australia sections, contributing greatly to the film’s rich themes of true homes and real families.

Arrival – There must be a name for an occurrence that makes you want to applaud in joy while shaking your head in shame. Bradford Young is the first black American to be nominated for Cinematography by the Academy (second black director of photography ever, after Brit Remi Adefarasen). It is a wonderful, precedent-breaking achievement by Young, who is wholly deserving of the honor and probably should have been so nominated two years ago for his work on Selma or three years ago for the impossibly gorgeous Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. However, the Academy should be embarrassed at the existence of such a precedent, as well as by the still-true fact no woman ever, not one time, has been nominated for this award.

Rest assured, however, this is no token nomination. Arrival is marvelous to behold, and Young’s photography is as notable for what it withholds as what it shows. For a big-budget sci-fi film about a visit from aliens, Young remains steadfastly restrained in his approach, helping establish the film’s tone as more thoughtful than action-minded. In his patient, observant camerawork, Young ensures Arrival is like no other science-fiction epic before it. Young most likely will not become the first black cinematographer to win this award, but if the Academy is paying attention, he will have other chances.

The final analysis

I am still tempted to predict Lubezki here as a write-in candidate, perhaps for some of the photos on his wonderful Instagram account. Wouldn’t that be something? In all seriousness, though, this is shaping up like a sweep year, the likes of which we have not seen since Slumdog Millionaire in 2008. The rapturous overall love for La La Land will likely carry it all the way down the ballot. Moonlight has picked up a number of critical notices for its cinematography, and Silence is just gorgeous to look at it, but this is La La Land’s award to lose.

Will win: La La Land

Should win: Silence

Should have been here: Jackie

Tomorrow: Best Editing