One Category at a Time: Best Sound Mixing

I feel like every year it gets harder and harder to predict what the Academy as a whole takes into consideration when voting on Best Sound Mixing. Even among the most avid film enthusiasts, the particulars of this craft can be mysterious and confusing. I sometimes struggle myself to decide what constitutes the finest achievement of the year (especially so this year), so trying to speculate as to what others will decide is next to an impossible task.

It brings me no pride to confess that this is the category with my poorest prediction record (roughly 38%), and even the corresponding industry guild -- the CAS, which announces its winners tomorrow -- hasn't matched up all that often: Only 6 of the last 13 CAS champs repeated with the Academy.

But there is one constant that can usually be counted on to pad your Oscar stats: Best Sound Mixing loves musicals.

My Award Nominations: Sound Mixing

Last week I gave the sound designers and editors their due, and today I look at those who best implemented their sounds into the acoustic machinery. As usual, there's often some overlap between my nominees for Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing (though not nearly as much overlap as the Academy's), so two movies are double-dipping as the best sounding film of the year for me. Find out which two they are, plus three other terrifically mixed projects after the jump.

My Award Nominations: Sound Editing

Truth be told, there was only one film I saw (that is, heard) this year whose sound design is so embedded into the identity of the movie that it instantly became my defacto winner. That said, there were still plenty of other impressive aural accomplishments, so for now I'll let you guess which of these five Best Sound Editing showcases will take my esteemed prize:

One Category at a Time: Best Sound Mixing

Something the Sound branch has often showed us in recent years is that it has no problem lining up the Best Picture frontrunners for Best Sound Mixing. The Best Picture winner has been nominated here four years running, so you might do well to pick and choose titles from your pool of predicted Best Picture nominees as potential Sound Mixing contenders.

To that end, I'm making a somewhat experimental prediction for The Tree of Life, mixed by Jeremy Pierson, Christopher Scarabosio, and Craig Berkey. Call this a hunch, but there always seems to be a critically respected film whose sound design does not stand out as an obvious nominee in this field.

I'm also gonna make another outlandish guess for an not-so-obvious contender, David Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I don't know if this is exactly an Oscar movie, but his last two films (Benjamin Button and The Social Network) have earned nominations for Sound Mixing despite mixes that are comparatively subtle and don't draw much attention to themselves.

Conversely, there always seems to be a critically detested film whose sound design is the most obvious of nominees in this field. That could be any number of summer blockbusters this year, but I'm going with Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Fourteen-time nominee Greg P. Russell is at the mixing board once again, and despite working on projects that are seldom Academy-friendly, his peers in the Sound branch always seem to recognize the quality of his work.

Getting back to the Best Picture contenders with possible appeal to the Sound branch, it's hard to argue with War Horse. War movies are a reasonable bet for all the combat sounds they incorporate, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Spielberg enlist his Oscar-winning sound team from Saving Private Ryan, who are sure to do a bang-up job.

And what of the critically favoured summer actioner? There's always at least one, and it'll probably be the token blockbuster Best Picture nominee. I'm going with Super 8 (assuming it ends up being critically favoured). J.J. Abrams has proven that he can direct the soundtrack of loud sci-fi action very capably, and the film's trailer seems to boast plenty of it.

Predicted five:
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Super 8
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
The Tree of Life
War Horse

Also consider: The Adventures of Tintin, Captain America, Cowboys and Aliens, The Green Lantern, Thor (Damn, there are a lot of superhero movies this summer! Won't Hollywood run out at some point?)