One Category at a Time: Production Design

Without a doubt, the toughest below-the-line awards to call this year are the design categories. The critics, the guilds, and BAFTA have unanimously lined up behind one film in both Costume Design and (today's topic) Production Design. But will the Academy really go there in either design field, let alone both?

My Award Nominations: Production Design

This weekend I'm tackling the design categories and cinematography, and as always there's an excellent variety of work that spoils us for choice. Behold my picks for the Best Production Design of the year.

Early Oscar Predictions: Design Categories

With the script finished and the project green-lighted, the next stage is setting the stage, as all the elements that will comprise the onscreen world of the movie need to be designed and built in pre-production. The Academy's production design, costume design, and makeup/hairstyling branches have traditionally favoured achievements in these fields that evoke period settings or more imaginative fantasy worlds. Movies that manage to straddle both of those design realms must always be considered formidable.

My Award Nominations: Best Production Design

I tell ya, it broke my heart to omit just about every title that you'll see in the 'just missed' section of this post, but that's the type of year it's been for production design. Outstanding work in too many films. I ultimately had to choose those whose sets and environments were engrained into the narrative identities of the stories they were telling, but it doesn't make it any easier to snub some other worthy effort.

Anyway, enough mourning the snubbees. Onto the five that did survive this brutally competitive melee for only five slots in Best Production Design.

'Budapest', 'Birdman', & 'Guardians' Take Top ADG Honours

Production designer Adam Stockhausen continued his unstoppable march towards the Oscar by picking up the Art Directors Guils Award in period design for his scrumptious work on The Grand Budapest Hotel. Honestly, enough said on this category already. Nothing's gonna beat this one. No one's gonna argue with that.

In the other categories, Birdman continued its recent guild surge by winning the award for contemporary design, thanks to Kevin Thompson's enormous Broadway recreations. And Guardians of the Galaxy's Charles Wood pulled off a mini-coup by snatching away the fantasy award from Oscar nominees Interstellar and Into the Woods.

One Category at a Time: Production Design

2014 was, in my opinion, a pretty awesome year for production designers. There was an extremely rich variety of work on display, from trippy sci-fi to austere period pieces, and from autere sci-fi to trippy period pieces! It's a shame that only five can be honoured by the Academy (the guild has three categories over which to spread the wealth), because I can definitely think of at least ten worthy of a nomination.

And yet, as outstanding as so many sets were in so many movies this year, there's only one that has rightful claim to this award. And fortunately, that's the one on track to win.

Review - The Grand Budapest Hotel

“There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity,” waxes Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson's pastry-lite eulogy for a golden pre-war age of chivalrous romanticism, classy refinement, and gaudy luxury.

Though now a desolate and scarcely frequented relic of a bygone era, the Grand Budapest was once the most lavishly appointed palace of 1930s Zubrowka – a fictional European nation on the brink of an unnamed war – where it was run by the fey and fastidious concierge Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and his faithful lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori). We hear Gustave and Zero's story as recounted by a much older Zero (F. Murray Abraham) to a curious author (Jude Law), whose subsequent writings of the interview are being read decades later by an anonymous student...

… But back to the story within the story within the story:

M. Gustave's suave gold-digging ways have won him the bequeathal of a priceless painting – the hilariously mundane “Boy With Apple” – from a recently deceased old dame (Tilda Swinton); Just one of Gustave's many wooed blondes. Intent on rescuing the art from the conniving hands of the old lady's son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) and the brass-armoured knuckles of his hit man Joplin (Wilem Dafoe), Gustave and Zero make off with the McGuffin in the name of historical preservation... until, that is, they decide a few seconds later to screw preservation and cash in on the painting.

One Category at a Time: Production Design

The Academy has thrown me for a loop in this category more often than any other craft category in recent years. When I predicted the weathered frontier recreations of There Will Be Blood they went with the stylized gothic environs of Sweeney Todd. When I predicted the refined set decoration of The King's Speech they went with the gaudy excess of Alice in Wonderland. So last year, I thought I'd get wise by predicting the lavish stylings of Anna Karenina to rule the day, and what do they do? They give it to the immaculate minutia of Lincoln! Suffice it to say I don't know how that win ever happened (not that it was in any way unworthy), but I'm willing to assume that it's more the exception than the rule. Typically, excess is what wins out in this category, even if it's against Best Picture nominated films.

Review - 12 Years a Slave

Two men labor on sweltering a Louisiana afternoon, planing wood and hammering nails into an small unfinished building. To their own eyes, they are equal; sharing conversation and stories of their lives. But equal they are not; one a free white man working for wage, the other a black man in bondage, working simply because it is what he was sold to do. “Your story is amazing,” the free man says to the slave. “And in no good way.” That really is the most essential way to describe the incredible true story of Solomon Northrup, who was kidnapped from his home and family to be sold into slavery. Based on Northrup's 1853 memoir, Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave stares unblinking into arguably the darkest chapter of the United States' history, making a case for itself as the definitive American horror story.

In 1814, still 59 years before the Emancipation Proclamation, Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) lives as an upstanding citizen in Saratoga, NY – an atypically progressive community for its time. A gifted violinist by trade and a decent man by nature, he is free and proud to walk the streets with his family, wearing his finest clothes, frequenting the finest shops, sheltered from common bigotry by his respected status. But this dream existence proves to be just that: a dream – one from which he awakens in shackles, alone and confused in a cold, dark cell. Daring to insist to his captors that he is free man and justice shall be done, he is flogged, menaced, and stripped of his identity along with his bloodied shirt. He is Solomon Northrup no more. He is a “Georgia runaway” by the name of Platt, or so he must pretend if he wishes to survive his waking nightmare.

My Awards nominations: Production Design

Had to omit some stellar work from my lineup this year. These hardworking production designers, set decorators, and art directors delivered settings and environments with so much personality, as did many others who just missed the cut. My top five films of 2012 for Production Design, Set Decoration, and Art Direction are:

Sunday Top Ten: Oscar noms that'll make me smile

Poles officially closed on Friday for Academy Award nominations. While the accountants at Price Waterhouse Coopers crunch the numbers, we're left to ponder and anticipate. My predictions are likely to shift and slide during the next few days. What will stay consistent are my personal rooting interests. There are certain contenders in several categories who feel like they're on the cusp of a nomination -- contenders who I'd love to see make good on that possibility -- but who could just as easily miss the cut. Here you go, Academy; you have ten chances to make me smile on Thursday morning.

Review - Moonrise Kingdom

An AWOL Khaki Scout and his sweetheart commit probably the most adorable elopement ever put on screen in Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, the latest in the auteur's ever-growing portfolio of exacting comedies, wherein subdued youthful angst and emotional exploration manifest themselves in a case of love on the run, sending shock waves through the cozily contained island community of New Penzance.

The two absconders in question are 12-year-olds Sam and Suzy, exquisitely played by newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward with a precocious, self-aware deadpan intended to serve Anderson and cowriter Roman Coppola's deliberately eccentric dialogue. He, an orphan who can't seem to make friends even among his fellow Khaki Scouts as they're so called (not to be confused with Baden-Powell's boys), and she, frustrated and smothered by a family composed of three banal brothers and lawyer parents who parley in legal jargon without a trace of irony or affection, have in common that they're both social outsiders, and both may be, as others perceive them to be, “emotionally disturbed” – but really, who wasn't at that age? Perhaps emotionally curious is a better way of summing it up, after a chance meeting at a church pageant followed by an intimate pen pal correspondence prompts them one summer to runaway together, certain that whatever existence they forge for themselves in the coastal wilderness of their island home will be happier than the ones they currently lead.