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.

One Category at a Time: Costume Design

For a while there, it looked like the Academy might never get over its obsession with Western European royalty in this category. A string of consecutive winners made up of Marie Antoinette, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, The Duchess, and The Young Victoria certainly cast the discouraging impression that Oscar voters had lost all their imagination when it comes to assessing the best dressed film of the year. Perhaps those complaints actually reached enough ears to initiate some kind of mini paradigm shift. Things have been looking up in Best Costume Design for the past few years, with the Academy branching out a bit in terms of the historical eras and geographical locales that the winning costumes have evoked. And with nary a stodgy royalty drama in sight, that trend looks to continue this year.

CDG last guild to announce winners

The Costume Designers Guild have crowned the best designed costumes of the year in three categories.

In the Period Film category, Jacqueline Durran further embosses herself as the Oscar favourite for her lavish Russian couture in Anna Karenina. Affection for the late Eiko Ishioka brought her a final guild honour in the Fantasy Film category for her off-the-wall designs in Mirror Mirror (might she be a spoiler possibility at the Oscars?). Jany Temime concluded Skyfall's impressive guild run with a win in the Contemporary category for her stylish spy-thriller threads.

One Category at a Time: Costume Design

As it is in Best Production Design, having the most noticeable design elements is an essential factor to winning Best Costume Design, which is why  suspect the likely winner of Best Production Design is also primed to win here too. These two categories do often go hand in hand. Splits between two films nominated in both categories (like the one we saw last year) don't happen as often as one film winning both.

My Awards nominations: Costume Design

My nominees for Costume Design after the cut:

Review - Anna Karenina

With numerous adaptations of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina already dotting the cinematic timeline, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard can at least be considered justified in wanting to stir the pot with this newest rendition of the titular adulteress' tragic fall from grace. Yet in attempting to strip the romance down to its emotional essence, their bold experiment misses the mark; a dazzling yet seemingly arbitrary exercise in stylization.

In 1870s tzarist Russia, Anna (Keira Knightley) is afforded all the luxuries and status that her marriage to Alexei Karenin (Jude Law) allows. That means lavish balls, dinners, theatre outings, the works. But when her eye catches the dashing regiment officer Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), her hidden desires prove too tempting to ignore. We watch as she destroys herself for forbidden love, spiraling from envied socialite to reviled pariah.