One Category at a Time: Production Design

Without a doubt, the toughest below-the-line awards to call this year are the design categories. The critics, the guilds, and BAFTA have unanimously lined up behind one film in both Costume Design and (today's topic) Production Design. But will the Academy really go there in either design field, let alone both?

CDG honours Mad Max, Danish Girl, Beasts of No Nation

Best Costume Design is far and away the closest contest in this year's Academy Awards. A mere twelve days ago I was pontificating that Sandy Powell's stylistic abundance in Cinderella would just edge out her own subtle work in Carol, and now I have Jenny Beavan's iconic Mad Max: Fury Road designs (winner of the Costume Designers Guild Award for Fantasy) just leading the way ahead of Paco Delgado's opulent period wardrobe in The Danish Girl (winner for Period). Beasts of No Nation took the Contemporary prize, but of course was not Oscar nominated. Instead that slot went to the arguable Best Picture frontrunner The Revenant, for Jacqueline West's "trapper chic".

This feels like an honest-to-God five horse race, and thankfully, not one that I'm too personally invested in. If either Sandy or Jenny come out on top, great! Score one the best costumers of the year! And if they both lose, well, they've each won before so no loss. Paco and Jacqueline are terrific designers in their own right and either would make a welcome addition to the winners circle.

One Category at a Time: Costume Design

The design categories have me at a loss this year. Best Production Design and Costume Design (the latter the subject of today's shaky analysis) both feature the two craft giants going at it for the distinction of most Oscars, but I have a tough time envisioning them as winners. The Academy likes its costumes pretty and plentiful. So lets start with a look at the prettiest and most plentiful of the lot:

One Category at a Time: Supporting Actress

It's hard out here for a Supporting Actress. For a true supporting actress, anyway. Worthy would-be contenders like Elizabeth Banks, Julie Walters, Sarah Paulson, Tessa Thompson, Joan Allen and several others had to move aside for the campaign train of wicked uncle Harv, as The Weinstein Co. and Focus Features collectively managed to shoehorn not one, but two leading performances into this year's contest.

And as an extra dash of salt to the proverbial wound, two of the three legit supporting ladies are in here for performances that are a far cry from awards-worthy (Okay, that's subject to taste, but that's why it's an independently owned blog, people!). Lest my pessimism over the category turn too many readers away, why don't we start with the positives:

One Category at a Time: Leading Actor

After several years of stacked competition, we find ourselves in the rare situation of Best Actor being the most lackluster of the four acting categories. All the better for the current frontrunner, who's been hungering for an Oscar for some time, and now has virtually no competition to bar him from claiming it.

Best Performance by a Grunter in a Leading Role

Last quarter 'true story' Oscar bait underwhelms

I can be a tough critic to please sometimes, but I get especially grinchy during the holiday crunch when awards season group-think forces me to seek out prestige-courting biopics and true-to-life narratives for which I'd gladly have waited. In the ten days since I first set eyes upon Todd Hayne's exquisite Carol, I've struck out thrice with other Globe/BFCA heavies Trumbo, The Danish Girl, and The Big Short; All of them capitalizing on year-end kudos, whether or not they should.

Trumbo is especially unfortunate. True Hollywood stories are of inherent interest to me (and many a cinephile, I should imagine), so it really says something when I despair at how unengaged I was by Jay Roach's shapeless biopic of the legendary screenwriter, who was infamously blackballed by McCarthy-era witch hunt politics. The man himself (likely Oscar nominee Bryan Cranston) would have shuddered at the screenplay's lack of structure and payoff. The film's strong SAG haul, particularly the Best Ensemble nomination, is baffling. Sure, there are a handful of droll impersonations in there -- David James Elliott's John Wayne and Dean O'Gorman's Kirk Douglas are aces -- but everyone is play acting instead of screen acting. Yes, there is a difference. The lone exceptions are Elle Fanning and Diane Lane as the key female figures in Trumbo's life, his daughter Niki and his wife Cleo.