Makeup and Hairstylists Guild winners

The Makeup and Hairstylists Guild handed out hardware for the first time in 10 years last night, and two of this year's Oscar nominees came away with winning honours; Bad Grandpa and Dallas Buyers Club, the latter of which I'm predicting to triumph with the Academy.

Winners and brief opinions after the cut.

One Category at a Time: Makeup and Hairstyling

The only thing predictable about the makeup branch is their unpredictability. It's often impossible to anticipate which celebrated film with excellent makeup will be shafted, and which critically dismissed films will make the cut at both the bakeoff and the nomination stage. Sometimes they go on a run of getting it right; The wins for The Wolfman and The Iron Lady are hard to dispute. Sometimes, they go on a run of getting it completely wrong; Last year's snub of Lincoln in favour of Hitchcock and this year's complete omission of Rush, The Butler, The Hobbit, and Lone Survivor from the bakeoff list is beyond embarrassing. As far as I'm concerned, only one of the three films that did survive this branch's questionable scrutiny deserves to be in the conversation, but hopefully that's the one that'll end up winning.

Makeup bake-off replete, as always, with baffling omissions

I don't know why I even bother predicting Best Makeup nominees before the list of finalists is unveiled. Every year there's at least one (or two, or in this case three of my presumed nominees) that fail to advance past the bake-off stage.

The unforgivable omissions this year are Rush and The Hobbit. The former not only applied squeamishly effective burn prosthetics to star Daniel Bruhl, but also featured tons of striking period hairstyles. In the case of the latter, I suppose it's possible that the makeup branch didn't deem there to be enough new makeup after last year's nominated effort already introduced us to all those dwarfs, but this one did boast many new characters designs from orcs to elves to skin-changers and involved a shitload of grime/dirt/weathering effects.

Confusing. Just... so confusing.