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: Production Design

The Academy has thrown me for a loop in this category more often than any other craft category in recent years. When I predicted the weathered frontier recreations of There Will Be Blood they went with the stylized gothic environs of Sweeney Todd. When I predicted the refined set decoration of The King's Speech they went with the gaudy excess of Alice in Wonderland. So last year, I thought I'd get wise by predicting the lavish stylings of Anna Karenina to rule the day, and what do they do? They give it to the immaculate minutia of Lincoln! Suffice it to say I don't know how that win ever happened (not that it was in any way unworthy), but I'm willing to assume that it's more the exception than the rule. Typically, excess is what wins out in this category, even if it's against Best Picture nominated films.

BAFTA winners do little to clarify Oscar race

With the Winter Olympics pushing the Oscar voting window back a couple of weeks, all eyes this were on the British Academy of Film and Television Awards (BAFTAs) to indicate any late-breaking momentum for this contender or that during this crucial final phase of the season. However, it seems that the Brits are about as indecisive as American awards groups have been this year, as they too ended up splitting their decision between the leading runners in the race.

In eerily similar fashion to the way the Golden Globes went down, Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave managed to claim the Best Film prize at the BAFTAs, but only after it had been nearly shut out all night long. Losing categories in which it is believed to be the Oscar favourite (Supporting Actress and Adapted Screenplay) must have been cause for excruciating nervousness, but then it reared its head at the last minute with a victory for lead actor Chiwetel Ejiofor (in the absence of Oscar frontrunner Matthew McConaughey) and ultimately Best Picture.

But Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity led the total trophy haul with six, including Best British Film. Ironically, many would argue that the actual Best Film winner 12 Years a Slave is more British than the Mexican director's U.S.-financed space adventure. Keeping its own Oscar fires stoked with three wins was David O. Russell's American Hustle.

Check out the winners below for more commentary on individual categories, and how the winners here might affect the Oscar outcome.

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).

My Award nominations: Original Song

As is the case every year, it's usually a bit of a struggle to find enough original songs that I feel significantly add to the films in which their used. But in the end, I always manage to cobble together five. Listen to my five favourite Original Songs of the year:

My Award nominations: Costume Design

Some of the Costume Design work this year reached levels of iconography that's hard for even one film to achieve in any year, and not even all of those films made my top five! The threads were just so perfect in so many films. Alas, only five can be nominated, and you can read the ones I chose below.

ADG winners

The Art Directors Guild (who should maybe following the Academy's suit and change their name to the Production Designers Guild?) handed out their seasonal hardware last night, and all three of the feature film winners are in the running for the Oscar. But will it mean all that much at the end of the day, or does this group's less-than-stellar predictive history suggest that a completely different film could win the big one?

For Best Period Production Design the ADG went for Catherine Martin's opulent Jazz Age decadence in The Great Gatsby, besting Best Picture heavyweights 12 Years a Slave and American Hustle. She would be an unsurprising Oscar winner, both in this category and Best Costume Design, but last year's shocking victory for the refined minutia of Lincoln suggests that maybe those aforementioned Best Picture contenders still have more than a reasonable shot.

My Award nominations: Production Design

Here's a category that's absolutely stuffed this year. It killed me to decide on that fifth spot, as it forced me to leave out the outstanding work done in films like Her and Inside Llewyn Davis. But you can see the Production Design jobs that did survive the cut below:

Art Directors Guild nominees

The parade of guild announcements marches on with Art Directors Guild. Will we find all of the Oscar nominees in the fifteen films honoured by the ADG? Not necessarily. Five of the last 25 Oscar nominees in this category were ones passed over by the guild, so it's not lights out yet for Oz the Great and Powerful or The Invisible Woman, although there's certainly enough good work this year to keep them off the final ballot.

The nominees and my commentaries after the cut:

Makeup bake-off replete, as always, with baffling omissions

I don't know why I even bother predicting Best Makeup nominees before the list of finalists is unveiled. Every year there's at least one (or two, or in this case three of my presumed nominees) that fail to advance past the bake-off stage.

The unforgivable omissions this year are Rush and The Hobbit. The former not only applied squeamishly effective burn prosthetics to star Daniel Bruhl, but also featured tons of striking period hairstyles. In the case of the latter, I suppose it's possible that the makeup branch didn't deem there to be enough new makeup after last year's nominated effort already introduced us to all those dwarfs, but this one did boast many new characters designs from orcs to elves to skin-changers and involved a shitload of grime/dirt/weathering effects.

Confusing. Just... so confusing.

Review - The Great Gatsby

When Baz Luhrmann announced that he was adapting the American literary classic The Great Gatsby, anticipation and skepticism abounded in equal measure. Would the Aussie auteur's in-your-face-stylistics be the right fit for the F. Scott Fitzgerald's subtext and symbolism? An unexpected schedule change that shifted its release date from the thick of last year's awards season to a less crowded May 2013 slot only heightened the nervous curiosity. The production became enshrouded in as many rumours and unsure whisperings as the mysterious titular antihero of the novel itself.

At first it appears as though Luhrmann might be adopting a style more conducive to his source material. In a opening that recalls Citizen Kane, we push on a flashing green light – just one of the story's many recurring symbolic motifs – before meeting our narrator; Nick Colloway (Tobey Maguire), a baby-faced but disillusioned Wall Street pencil pusher now confined to a sanitarium where he recounts his experiences with a wealthy and elusive tycoon named Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio).

Early Oscar predictions - Part 5

Today's post is a short one, just looking at some of the possibilities in Production Design, Costume Design, and Makeup & Hairstyling. Next week we'll finish up the early predictions with a look at the aural craft categories.