One Category at a Time: Film Editing

The contest for Best Film Editing is always closely associated with Best Picture. Since editors and directors work pretty much hand in hand, the editors branch of AMPAS tends to nominate based on quality of the films as much as quality of just the editing. On top of that, the film to win Best Film Editing is often well liked enough that it almost always wins multiple categories (last year's victory for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo being among the rare exceptions). And since editing can be such an invisible art at times, the winning film is usually required to have the “most” editing, rather than the “best”, to earn the Academy's attention.

My Award nominations: Film Editing

Some good variety on display this year in the arena of Film Editing, and my top five are:

Review - Zero Dark Thirty

At 12:30 a.m. on May 2^nd 2011, Black Ops raided a compound in Pakistan and shot dead the world's most wanted man, Osama Bin Laden. It was the culmination of a long, tiring search by the CIA which inspired Kathryn Bigelow's clinical new thriller Zero Dark Thirty.

As fictionalized by writer Mark Boal, the CIA men and women who worked for years to track down the reviled terrorist are amalgamated and personified by the character of Maya (Jessica Chastain), but that's about as fictional as his screenplay gets. The vast majority of it is a straight-laced, doggedly researched piece of cine-journalism, which condenses several firsthand accounts into a tightly-wound docudrama.