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: 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.

Review - American Hustle

American Hustle opens, as one might expect from a movie about scammers and con-artists, with a con job; But not a con job that has anything important to do with the plot. The con job in question is a man's toupée. Spending several meticulous minutes brushing on paste, applying the shabby tuft of a hairpiece, and then elaborately combing over his side hair so that every follicle is in precisely the right place, this man, Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), is attempting to con the world at large into believing that he has no bald spot.

American Hustle, the latest from writer-director David O. Russell's career reinvention as a helmer of madcap character pieces, can itself be described like that toupée: A tangled, messy, unruly concealment of a script littered with bald spots, and yet we can't help but stare in enjoyment at the sight of it. That wig, however insubstantial, is a lot more fun to watch than a head of real hair.