One Category at a Time: Film Editing

Well... I got nothin'.

I've been very hit-and-miss in this category as of late, failing to guess the retrospectively obvious win for Gravity last year and the forever unobvious win for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo two years before that. But I ain't never seen a Best Film Editing race as confusing as this year's, in which the Best Picture favourite isn't even in the running, and almost every nominee feels like a possible – heck, even a likely – winner.

My Award Nominations: Best Film Editing

Today I've got a couple of post-production elements to add to my growing awards ballot. Starting things off is Best Film Editing. The temptation was great, but I resisted the urge to merely load this category with Best Picture nominees (this ain't the Oscars!), and tried to branch out where I could. The following five films are not only extremely well edited, but they also display a very wide cross-section of editing styles. Variety is the spice of film awards!

Check 'em out after the jump.

'Boyhood', 'Grand Budapest' Win with Editors Guild

The American Cinema Editors handed out their hardware last night, honouring Boyhood's Sandra Adair in the drama category and The Grand Budapest Hotel's Barney Pilling in the muscial/comedy category. Both were nominated by the Academy.

I gotta say this Oscar category is still a complete mystery to me. It used to be that the winner of the ACE drama award always went on to win the Oscar, but that pattern has been bucked twice in the last three years. True, Boyhood could pull out the win on account of its "12 years of footage" narrative (a bit of an oversimplification, as it's actually only 12 weeks of footage amassed over 12 years), but the Academy usually goes for editing that... stands out. The greatest thing about Boyhood's montage is how invisibly fluent it is. I could definitely see something with a more rigourous cutting style like Whiplash or American Sniper taking it.

Elsewhere, The LEGO Movie won the animated category, adding more salt to the wound of its Oscar snub, while Citizenfour won the doc category for Mathilde Bonnefoy (who will actually get to take home her own Oscar since she's also a producer on the film).

Review - Boyhood

2002 was, as I recall, a pretty decent year for the movies; Old masters like Roman Polanski and Martin Scorsese were churning out vital and lovingly crafted historical dramas; Rising stars like Spike Jonze, Charlie Kauffman, and Rob Marshall made a big splash with conceptually daring genre experiments; Steven Spielberg was having a ton of fun with a one-two punch of smart and entertaining popcorn pics; The ever-opinionated Michael Moore gave the documentary industry an urgent shot in the arm; American audiences got to set eyes on a number of foreign treasures from Hayao Miyazaki, Alfonso Cuaron, and many more... And that's just scratching the surface.

But perhaps the most unique and singular cinematic undertaking of that year is one that wouldn't see the light of day until 2014, for 2002 is when Richard Linklater began filming his magnum opus Boyhood, which he shot in sequence over the course of a dozen years and has finally unveiled for us this summer.

This patient process (also evidenced in Linklater's decade-spanning Before trilogy) might be dismissed by some as a conceptual gimmick, and in the hands of a lesser director it very well could be. But Linklater's vision takes the fragmented instants of a childhood – the agony, the ecstasy, and the mundane – and elevates it to high art. Boyhood is in fact a masterpiece of objective observation, with a soft-spoken but profound epiphany about the ethereal constancy of life hidden amongst the minutia.