One Category at a Time: Best Makeup & Hairstyling

The polls are open! And with just under two weeks to go until the big night, it's time to start breaking down the previous two months of precursors and campaign antics to determine who will be the winners at the 89th Academy Awards.

All eyes will be glued to see if La La Land can tie the auspicious record of 11 wins (currently held by Ben-Hur, Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King), but I'm kicking off my yearly series of predictions with one of the few categories where Damien Chazelle's powerhouse musical missed the nomination: Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

This has always been a wonderfully weird contest for Oscar watchers: There is perhaps no branch of the Academy more iconoclastic than the makeup branch, with its active resistance to beloved Best Picture frontrunners or seemingly obvious contenders. And with only three slots available (umm... why?), high profile snubs are a yearly occurrence. Winning this particular Oscar is 50% quality of work, 50% the branch eliminating the heaviest competition. Suffering from their unpredictable tendencies this year was Florence Foster Jenkins, the only semifinalist to have been nominated by both the BAFTA and the corresponding industry guild MUAHS. Alas, Meryl's wigs and syphilis weren't enough, clearing the way for our first nominee.

My Award Nominations: Makeup and Hair

I'll be honest: There weren't a whole lot of makeup and hair jobs that really impressed me last year. Sure, there were plenty of films in which they played a key role, but nothing on the level with recent efforts that have won my personal prize. Nevertheless, these five movies feature transformative work good enough for a mention in Best Hair and Makeup (which I shall temporarily rename 'The Passion of Andrew Garfield Award'):

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.

My Awards nominations: Hair and Makeup

In this digital age it always does me good to see that this dying art is still kicking its legs. The best Hair and Makeup achievements of the year are:

Captain America: The First Avenger
(David White, Lisa Westcott):

Redskull is a creepy and iconic creation, but let's not forget all the detailing that goes into those WWII battle scars and period hairdos.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows 2
(Nick Dudman, Amanda Knight, Lisa Tomblin):

Okay, so not everybody was convinced by the epilogue aging, but that doesn't diminish the quality and quantity of the other fantastical character designs.

Green Lantern (Joel Harlow, Felicity Bowring):

Wonderful alien creations and Peter Saarsgard's pronounced forehead are appropriately cartoonish but also convincingly done.

The Iron Lady (Mark Coulier, Marese Langan):

Nuanced aging work takes us through Thatcher's glory days to her desiccated "golden years" with tangible authenticity.

Thor (Luisa Abel, Janice Alexander):

The frost giants are particularly elaborate designs, but let's not forget all that robust Asgaardian facial hair.

Just missed: Captain America, Harry Potter 8, Hugo, War Horse

One Category at a Time: Best Makeup

It's hard to tell what direction this branch will go on a yearly basis. They really do nominate what they feel constitutes the best work, and pay little attention to critical reception or Best Picture buzz. And to be honest, that's the way it aught to be. So who stands a chance of getting in this year?

Given their openness to nominating films that the critics really don't give a damn about, I haven't got a problem in predicting a film like Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides - one which I doubt will fare too well with cinephiles - to earn a nod. Two of the previous three Pirates films made it in here, and with past winners Joel Harlow and Peter King on board, I imagine the makeup work will be great.

A call I'm less confident in but still willing to make is A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg's look at the lives and work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The film's makeup and hair designer Stephan Dupuis already has an Oscar to his name, albeit for his more grotesque transformative magic on Cronenberg's The Fly. Can he follow up his sole nomination from 25 years ago with another one for what we can only assume will be more subtle work?

And what about all those comic-book-character-based blockbusters coming out this summer? Surely they can't all be passed over by the Academy. Captain America's WWII setting may allow Lisa Westcott and David White to cook up some realistic war-related makeup to compliment what will probably be their more memorable creation; Hugo Weaving's transformation into Red Skull.

Predicted three:
Captain America: The First Avenger
A Dangerous Method
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Also consider: Cowboys and Aliens, The Green Lantern, Harry Potter 7, The Iron Lady, Thor, War Horse.