CDG Winners

The Costume Designers Guild wrapped up the industry-based awards last night on the final day of Oscar voting. They elected Hidden Figures in Period, Doctor Strange in Fantasy and La La Land in Contemporary.

Given that polls are now closed and that the guild is a smaller membership prone to idiosyncratic decisions now and then (remember W.E.... didn't think so), I don't think I'll be swayed from predicting Jackie for the Oscar, but it feels like a very pliable contest. Florence Foster Jenkins could surprise, and La La Land would make a satisfying winner on behalf of overlooked contemporary design efforts.

One Category at a Time: Best Costume Design

As many of us have been thinking ever since the BAFTAs so judiciously spread the wealth nine days ago (right before Oscar polls opened), a La La Land crafts sweep is now more improbable than probable, and I'd argue the category where it faces the biggest uphill climb is Best Costume Design.

My Award Nominations: Costume Design

This might be 2016's strongest craft category if you ask me. So many projects positively dripping with sartorial taste, leaving us with an embarrassment of well-tailored riches. Choosing five Best Costume Design nominees was tough, but choosing a winner is going to be my biggest challenge.

[UPDATED] Guilds Round-Up: CAS, VES, ASC, MUAHS, CDG

The BAFTA and PGA weren't the only industry groups that got a word in yesterday. Here's a summary of other artisan guilds and societies that have had their say in advance of Friday's Oscar deadline:

AMERICAN SOCIETY of CINEMATOGRAPHERS

Arrival -- Bradford Young
La La Land -- Linus Sandgren
Lion -- Greig Fraser
Moonlight -- James Laxton
Silence -- Rodrigo Prieto
That's a mighty fine-looking lineup, folks.
In fact, swap one of these out for The Light Between Oceans and you have my own personal ballot. As it stands, this could be a perfect match-up with Oscar's cinematography branch. To see Bradford Young and Greig Fraser nominated alongside eachother would certainly make happy many a cinephile who have itched to see them recognized for years. But I have a sneaky suspicion Robert Richardson could still figure in for Live By Night. He's pulled the very same trick sans guild nomination before.

CINEMA AUDIO SOCIETY

Sound Mixing -- Live Action Motion Picture

Doctor Strange
Hacksaw Ridge
La La Land
Rogue One
Sully
I'm not sold on Doctor Strange as an Oscar nominee here (no MCU movie has been nominated in this category if you can believe it). As to what takes it over, I'm leaning towards Arrival, which is infinitely more deserving anyway, but quality of work is no guarantee with this branch. Are we all excited to see Kevin O'Connell (Hacksaw Ridge) lose his 21st Oscar to another musical on February 26th?
I know I am (*ties hangman's noose around neck*)

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:

My Award Nominations: Costume Design

Spanning from a post-apocalyptic future to as far back as "once upon a time", this year's best movie fashions defined their characters to a tee, whether going for sartorial subtext or eye-catching iconography. The category is Costume Design, and my five best dressed films are:

Review - Cinderella

Traditionalists can be forgiven for continually scoffing at Walt Disney Pictures for their current habit of repurposing their most beloved animated classics into money-sponging live-action productions. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Alice in Wonderland have already fallen victim to the artistically dubious Mirror Mirror, Maleficent and Tim Burton's unspeakable 2010 eyesore, with plans afoot for everything from Beauty and the Beast to Dumbo to Winnie the Pooh.
This year's episode of 'remake musical chairs' is none other than Cinderella.

Purists' initial reaction may be to cringe and look away, but with the right tone in the right directorial hands (in this case, the aptly theatrical Kenneth Branagh), who's to say that these relics can't be improved, even if only mildly?

While Walt's 1950 hit about the woebegone dreamer with the glass slippers may be remembered as a classic, it's sometimes misremembered as 'good' classic.
Truth is, it simply does not hold up to modern scrutiny, proving to be more Tom & Jerry cartoon than cinematic achievement, and only peripherally about its titular maiden. If any of Disney's dusty animated properties was due for a refurbishing,
it was this one.

Early Oscar Predictions: Design Categories

With the script finished and the project green-lighted, the next stage is setting the stage, as all the elements that will comprise the onscreen world of the movie need to be designed and built in pre-production. The Academy's production design, costume design, and makeup/hairstyling branches have traditionally favoured achievements in these fields that evoke period settings or more imaginative fantasy worlds. Movies that manage to straddle both of those design realms must always be considered formidable.

'Birdman' Closes Out Dominant Season with CDG Win

The last industry group to announce its winners in advance of Sunday night's Academy Awards was the Costume Designers Guild. They sprang for Oscar frontrunner Milena Canonero's stylized pre-war European threads from The Grand Budapest Hotel in period design, Colleen Atwood's theatrically informed fairytale garb from Into the Woods in fantasy design, and Albert Wolsky's character-serving vestments from Birdman in contemporary design (the movie's tenth and final guild victory of the season).

All three of these costumers are legends in their field, each having already been honoured by the CDG and won multiple Oscars before last night. And I honestly can't protest any of them winning again. Well done!

One Category at a Time: Costume Design

For a while there, it looked like the Academy might never get over its obsession with Western European royalty in this category. A string of consecutive winners made up of Marie Antoinette, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, The Duchess, and The Young Victoria certainly cast the discouraging impression that Oscar voters had lost all their imagination when it comes to assessing the best dressed film of the year. Perhaps those complaints actually reached enough ears to initiate some kind of mini paradigm shift. Things have been looking up in Best Costume Design for the past few years, with the Academy branching out a bit in terms of the historical eras and geographical locales that the winning costumes have evoked. And with nary a stodgy royalty drama in sight, that trend looks to continue this year.

My Award Nominations: Best Costume Design

I unveilled my five picks for Best Hair and Makeup this morning, but that's only half of what goes into defining the look of a character on film. Costume designers have to do a lot of heavy lifting (or sewing, as it were) on that front too.

Similarly to my opinion of the Best Supporting Actor field, I can't help but think it's been a bit of a weak year. Not to say that any of the five costume designers listed below don't deserve the praise coming their way, but I found that there weren't that many worthy contenders to pick from, which I think is reflected in my ballot's similarity to the Oscar slate (again, like in Best Supporting Actor). Consensus is boring for awards watchers, I know, but sometimes it's because the best options really are that obvious. I suppose I should look at the glass as being half full and rejoice that costume designers branch mostly got it right this year.

Some for it's worth, here are my (and many other people's) Best Costume Design nominees for 2014:

CDG Adds to Busy Day of Guild Announcements

The Costume Designers Guild have unveiled their 2014 nominees in three categories, so let's get right into it with the most Oscar-correlative category, Excellence in a Period Film:

Period Film
The Grand Budapest Hotel - Milena Canonero
The Imitation Game - Sammy Sheldon Differ
Inherent Vice - Mark Bridges
Selma - Ruth E. Carter
The Theory of Everything - Steven Noble

I can hear the groaning now, but I'll defend the nomination of Theory of Everything. I liked Noble's simple colour associations with the characters. For the win, however, I'd have a tough time deciding between Grand Budapest and Inherent Vice. The outfits in those two have so much personality!

Will win: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Should win: The Grand Budapest Hotel or Inherent Vice

Two more categories after the cut.

Review - Into the Woods

Often I wish more than anything... more than life... that Hollywood would provide us with more movie musicals than it currently does. We musical theatre lovers are lucky if we can get one live-action song-and-dance film a year. Luckier yet if its a good one.

It puts me in a situation as sticky as pitch when it comes to evaluating the big screen adaptation of a stage musical that I don't love nearly as much as the genre it represents. The show in question is Sondheim & Lapine's Into the Woods, translated into cinematic form by director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Nine) and positioned as Disney's big holiday season draw.

The original production which debuted on Broadway in 1988 could best be described as a revisionist fairytale: The paths of various familiar Grimm characters intersect en route to their storybook endings as they venture through the woods. Among them are Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Jack of eventual beanstalk infamy (Daniel Huttlestone), Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), a baker and his wife (James Corden and Emily Blunt), a pair of vain if charming princes (Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen), and a scheming witch (Meryl Streep).

Review - The Theory of Everything

"Cosmology," responds PhD candidate Stephen Hawking when asked about religion at a Cambridge mixer in 1963. "It's religion for scientific atheists."

This answer may seem like an odd way to pick up girls (especially proper Christian ones), but it strikes a chord for the young woman who's asking him – and who just so happens to be his future wife, Jane. Perhaps she too sees the beauty in his pursuit of a single universal equation that can explain all the mysteries of time and space; A 'theory of everything'.

It's not the equation, however, but the two lovers who become the subjects of The Theory of Everything, directed by successful documentary filmmaker James Marsh in his narrative feature debut. From that first cosmic spark of attraction to their gradual growing apart and everything in between (including the renowned physicist's long battle with disease and disability), the film chooses to deal more with humanistic romance than scientific philosophy, though packaged as a by-the-numbers biopic with Oscar aspirations for its stars Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne.

Gravity and 12 Years a Slave take final guild honours

The last two guilds to hand out hardware this season (the Cinema Audio Society and the Costume Designers Guild) did so last night, making winners out of leading Best Picture contenders Gravity and 12 Years a Slave.

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.

Costume Designers Guild weighs in

The busy day of precursor announcements soldiers on with the Costume Designers Guild. In years past, the costume designers and production designers within the Academy were all lumped into one branch that determined nominees for both categories. This year, however, they have finally split into two distinct branches, so its possible that the respective guild opinions are more predictive of the eventual Oscar nominees. Or perhaps not. we'll just have to wait and see.

Nominees in all three feature film categories (and my corresponding thoughts) after the cut.

Best Costume Design, Period
12 Years a Slave, Patricia Norris
American Hustle, Michael Wilkinson
Dallas Buyers Club, Kurt & Bart
The Great Gatsby, Catherine Martin
Saving Mr. Banks, Daniel Orlandi

I've been holding off on predicting Saving Mr. Banks in this category. The costumes just seemed so... bland to me. But after scoring with BAFTA this morning and now with the guild, it seems to be in the thick of it. Obviously, Catherine Martin remains the one to beat, both here and for the Oscar, and I can hardly argue with that. I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, we might see Mary Zophres score here for Inside Llewyn Davis. It was the last chance for the excellently dressed film to get some recognition in that respect, but I guess I'm banging the drum alone this year.

Best Costume Design, Contemporary
Blue Jasmine, Suzy Benzinger
Her, Casey Storm
Nebraska, Wendy Chuck
Philomena, Consolata Boyle
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Sarah Edwards

It's a delight to see Blue Jasmine and Her score here (although for the latter, you could even make a case for a Fantasy categorization, although this feels more appropriate), but I can't quite wrap my head around the Inclusion of Nebraska or Philomena. I might have preferred Sandy Powell's work from the Wolf of Wall Street to find a home here.

Best Costume Design, Fantasy
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Ann Maskrey, Richard Taylor, Bob Buck
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Trish Summerville
Oz the Great and Powerful, Gary Jones & Michael Kutsche

I've expressed my bewilderment in the past as to why the CDG doesn't honour five nominees in this category? There were more than three fantasy films in 2013, and some had better costumes than these three. What about Man of Steel or Pacific Rim?

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.