One Category at a Time: Makeup and Hairstyling

Like it was this time last year, I find myself running around in illogical circles trying to determine the winner of this year's Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Do I go with the most liked film, the coolly received but star-transforming biopic, or the fantasy with the “most” makeup?

My Award nominations: Makeup and Hair

This is the only category this year in which none of my own nominees are up for the Oscar. Shame, shame, Makeup branch. Don't you understand that these three movies have the Best Makeup and Hair of the year?

Review - The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

“That seems a bit excessive, doesn't it?” Bilbo Baggins mentions to a particularly rotund dwarf carrying several large wheels of cheese through a snug hobbit hole. It's a throwaway sight gag that plays for a quick chuckle in the first third of the first third (not a typo) of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit, but this insignificant moment perfectly sums up my thoughts on the matter: a 2-hour and fifty-minute movie just for the first 100 pages of a childrens novel? Doesn't this whole enterprise seem a bit excessive?

Preceding the Middle Earth events depicted in Jackson's gargantuan Lord of the Rings trilogy by a good sixty years, The Hobbit takes its excruciating time in setting us up for the adventures of young Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman, excellent in a mostly passive role), a quiet hobbit with no desire to stray from the cozy confines of his beloved Shire. When the meddling but unquestionably good wizard Gandalf the Grey (commanded once again by Sir Ian McKellan) signs Bilbo up to join a company of raucous dwarfs on their quest to recapture their home from a marauding dragon, he is naturally reluctant. But he is finally persuaded, and the unexpected journey begins (a good forty minutes into the film, mind you).

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.