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.

My Award Nominations: Best Costume Design

I unveilled my five picks for Best Hair and Makeup this morning, but that's only half of what goes into defining the look of a character on film. Costume designers have to do a lot of heavy lifting (or sewing, as it were) on that front too.

Similarly to my opinion of the Best Supporting Actor field, I can't help but think it's been a bit of a weak year. Not to say that any of the five costume designers listed below don't deserve the praise coming their way, but I found that there weren't that many worthy contenders to pick from, which I think is reflected in my ballot's similarity to the Oscar slate (again, like in Best Supporting Actor). Consensus is boring for awards watchers, I know, but sometimes it's because the best options really are that obvious. I suppose I should look at the glass as being half full and rejoice that costume designers branch mostly got it right this year.

Some for it's worth, here are my (and many other people's) Best Costume Design nominees for 2014:

Makeup and Hair Guild Nominations

The Academy's nomination balloting closes today, but the Makeup and Hairstylists Guild has chimed in before that final bell (there are four other guilds announcing next week, so their nominees will have no influence on Oscar).

This guild hadn't regularly given out awards for some time, until they decided to revive the tradition last year, honouring several films among which was the eventual Oscar winner Dallas Buyers Club.

Leading the field this year are Guardians of the Galaxy and Into the Woods, each receiving three nominations across five categories. Guardians is looking good for an Oscar nod (and possibly the win), but Into the Woods failed to even make the short list.

Besides Guardians, other Oscar finalists which find representation here include The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Theory of Everything each with a pair, and Foxcatcher and Maleficent each with a single citation for their transformative prosthetics. Noah and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 were shut out entirely.

One final side note before we dig into the nominees: This guild needs to do a better job with their categorizations. How do they determine what counts as contemporary as opposed to period makeup/hair, and how do they account for fantasy offerings? Hunger Games gets called period, while Guardians of the Galaxy gets called contemporary? I haven't exactly seen a lot of modern day folks walking around looking like this:

This was a problem last year too, which saw The Butler classified as contemporary and Dallas Buyers Club as period, but enough of that. On to this year's slate:

Summer catch-up

Just reserving this space to comment on a few spring/summer flicks I never got around to writing up proper. It's not like I have anything better to do until the awards movies start creeping out of their fall festival hidey holes.