MPSE honours Gravity, Captain Phillips

The Motion Picture Sound Editors spread the wealth last night, handing no more than one award to any film in contention, but the main prize of Best Sound Effects and Foley (which correlates most closely to the Academy's Sound Editing award) went to Gravity. Captain Phillips picked up a win as well for its ADR, but none of the other prize winners are up for the Oscar. Read the list after the cut.

One Category at a Time: Costume Design

The costume designers in the Academy got to veer off into their own branch this year, having previously been lumped in with the production designers until now. However, there doesn't appear to be a noticeable discrepancy in their voting patterns, as a certain degree of overlap clearly still exists between the two categories (three common films between them, which is not unusual).

One Category at a Time: Cinematography

There are just 22 business days left until the Oscars, and yet it still feels like they're an eternity away. Part of that may have to do with the fact that the Winter Olympics (the only arena in which my home country can even come close to claiming world-power status, so I'll be watching them intently) has pushed the awards ceremony, and consequently the voting period, back a week.

That's an awful long wait, during which an awful lot can happen to affect the race. Gravity stands as the frontrunner at this moment, but we may have plenty of reason to believe otherwise by the time Oscar night is upon us. Heck: we have plenty of reason to believe otherwise right now! But I'll get to that category in due course. Obviously, I tend to start these prediction columns with the categories that are easiest to call, and one of the easiest calls this year is Best Cinematography.

My Award nominations: Cinematography

I'm kicking off this year's award nominees with my favourite of all categories, Best Cinematography. There was a lot of great work to pick from this year, and inevitably I had to leave some excellent work off my final five (some that will probably be Oscar recognized anyway).

Check out my top five below, accompanied by my favourite shot from each.

Seven nominees from ASC!

To cap off the busy day of precursor announcements, the American Society of Cinematographers has had their say. This category has felt for a while now like a tight six or seven horse race for only five slots, and that theory has been proven quite literally by the guild. In a shocking tie for that fifth slot, we have seven nominees for the ASC's top prize of the year, meaning this gives us no help in making our Oscar predictions (except perhaps that we can now relegate Rush to the also-rans).

The nominees are:

Barry Ackroyd, Captain Phillips
Sean Bobbit, 12 Years a Slave
Roger Deakins, Prisoners
Bruno Delbonnel, Inside Llewyn Davis
Philippe Le Sourd, The Gransmaster
Emmanuel Lubezki, Gravity
Phedon Papamichael, Nebraska

Wadjda and The Past smarting after surprising omission from Foreign shortlist

It happens every year (even with the dubious executive committee) that a number of celebrated films from world cinema fail to make the Academy's shortlist of nine for Best Foreign Language film. It's a cruel but necessary process to cull the mammoth list of submissions (76 entries this year) down to a manageable number.

The Past, Asghar Farhadi's followup to his Oscar-winning A Separation, is one of the high-profile casualties this year I haven't yet seen it, but have actually heard mixed things about it. The snub that stings the most for me personally was Haifaa Al-Mansour's Wadjda from Saudi Arabia, which is just a wonderful movie. Plain and simple. I think if it had been nominated, it would have been in good position to win the whole thing, but now we'll never know.

Among the surviving nine, the ones I've so far seen include Belgium's The Broken Circle Breakdown, Hong Kong's The Grandmaster, and Denmark's The Hunt. All three certainly have their champions, but I wasn't all that taken with the former two. The Hunt, however, is quite good, and may well be the one to watch for the win (... if it gets nominated, of course -- you never can tell with this branch).

The Broken Circle Breakdown (Belgium)
An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
The Missing Picture (Cambodia)
The Hunt (Denmark)
Two Lives (Germany)
The Grandmaster (Hong Kong)
The Notebook (Hungary)
The Great Beauty (Italy)
Omar (Palestine)

Capsule Reviews for the Dog Days of Summer

With the fall festival season just around the corner and pundits gearing up for the months-long deluge of awards hopefuls, now seems like a good opportunity to take advantage of the calm before the storm by catching up with some summer releases I never got around to writing about. Here are some 1-or-2-sentence reactions to various films: