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.

ADG winners

The Art Directors Guild (who should maybe following the Academy's suit and change their name to the Production Designers Guild?) handed out their seasonal hardware last night, and all three of the feature film winners are in the running for the Oscar. But will it mean all that much at the end of the day, or does this group's less-than-stellar predictive history suggest that a completely different film could win the big one?

For Best Period Production Design the ADG went for Catherine Martin's opulent Jazz Age decadence in The Great Gatsby, besting Best Picture heavyweights 12 Years a Slave and American Hustle. She would be an unsurprising Oscar winner, both in this category and Best Costume Design, but last year's shocking victory for the refined minutia of Lincoln suggests that maybe those aforementioned Best Picture contenders still have more than a reasonable shot.

My Award nominations: Production Design

Here's a category that's absolutely stuffed this year. It killed me to decide on that fifth spot, as it forced me to leave out the outstanding work done in films like Her and Inside Llewyn Davis. But you can see the Production Design jobs that did survive the cut below:

Review - Her

Boy meets computer, boy loses computer in Spike Jonze's Her. But if you think this in any way resembles a typical love story, you'd be wrong... and right. Admittedly, how much you get out of this singular experiment in screen romance will hinge entirely on whether or not you can get past its bizarre premise. If not, you may find it to be unintentionally funny at best. But if you can bring yourself to buy it as more than a farfetched swing-and-a-miss, you may indeed discover a weirdly moving film whose subversive satire and thought-provoking themes border on the profound.

Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix following up his career-best work in The Master with yet another brilliant performance) can read people, but not connect with them. He works at a company that specializes in writing touching personal letters for people who lack the time or eloquence to do so themselves, and as gifted as Theodore is at anticipating the words that will move his clients, he is a lonely man – smarting from a painful breakup – who fears that he could never again be as moved as the readers of his ghost-written letters.

Art Directors Guild nominees

The parade of guild announcements marches on with Art Directors Guild. Will we find all of the Oscar nominees in the fifteen films honoured by the ADG? Not necessarily. Five of the last 25 Oscar nominees in this category were ones passed over by the guild, so it's not lights out yet for Oz the Great and Powerful or The Invisible Woman, although there's certainly enough good work this year to keep them off the final ballot.

The nominees and my commentaries after the cut: