Busy Guild Weekend: WGA, CAS, MPSE, MAHS

We're into the final stretch, and this long weekend saw a smattering of the remaining guilds announce their winners for the year (only the CDG is left).

The most contested of them would have to be the Writers Guild of America Awards, where the three presumed Best Picture heavyweights Moonlight, La La Land and Manchester by the Sea all squared off against each other for Best Original Screenplay. Moonlight won that distinction, giving me just a bit more comfort in sticking with it for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, although this gives us no further hints in the nail-biter between La La Land and Manchester for the Original Screenplay prize.

With both Moonlight and Lion absent from the guild's Best Adapted Screenplay category, Arrival was able to capitalize. What a wonderful surprise it would be if it could translate its Critics Choice and WGA cache into Oscar gold!

The prize for Documentary Screenplay went to Robert Kenner's Command and Control, which had been shortlisted for the Oscar but failed to make the final five.

One Category at a Time: Best Makeup & Hairstyling

The polls are open! And with just under two weeks to go until the big night, it's time to start breaking down the previous two months of precursors and campaign antics to determine who will be the winners at the 89th Academy Awards.

All eyes will be glued to see if La La Land can tie the auspicious record of 11 wins (currently held by Ben-Hur, Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King), but I'm kicking off my yearly series of predictions with one of the few categories where Damien Chazelle's powerhouse musical missed the nomination: Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

This has always been a wonderfully weird contest for Oscar watchers: There is perhaps no branch of the Academy more iconoclastic than the makeup branch, with its active resistance to beloved Best Picture frontrunners or seemingly obvious contenders. And with only three slots available (umm... why?), high profile snubs are a yearly occurrence. Winning this particular Oscar is 50% quality of work, 50% the branch eliminating the heaviest competition. Suffering from their unpredictable tendencies this year was Florence Foster Jenkins, the only semifinalist to have been nominated by both the BAFTA and the corresponding industry guild MUAHS. Alas, Meryl's wigs and syphilis weren't enough, clearing the way for our first nominee.

My Award Nominations: Makeup and Hair

I'll be honest: There weren't a whole lot of makeup and hair jobs that really impressed me last year. Sure, there were plenty of films in which they played a key role, but nothing on the level with recent efforts that have won my personal prize. Nevertheless, these five movies feature transformative work good enough for a mention in Best Hair and Makeup (which I shall temporarily rename 'The Passion of Andrew Garfield Award'):

[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*)

The Revenant and Mad Max stilling burning up the artisan guilds

The Cinema Audio Society and the Makeup and Hair Stylists Guild announced their best of the year last night, and unsurprisingly it was The Revenant and Mad Max: Fury Road (respectively) that came away as the big winners, solidifying their grasps on those correlative Oscar categories.

Mind you, these are still far from sure things, and the biggest competition these two movies face in Best Sound Mixing and Best Makeup and Hair are... each other.

One Category at a Time: Makeup and Hairstyling

Best Makeup and Hairstyling is traditionally easy pickings for pundits. Just choose whichever one of the three (since this branch stubbornly refuses to expand to a more appropriate five) is a Best Picture nominee, or in the absence of one, choose whichever has the most obvious makeup.

But this year is a veritable coin toss between two Best Picture nominees who happen to be squaring off in almost every craft category, including this one. Trying to decipher how AMPAS will split the love between them is a maddening game indeed.

My Award Nominations: Hair & Makeup

Like the costumers, the Hair & Makeup crews have a huge responsibility in visually defining  film's characters. Why the Academy's correlative branch is still reluctant to expand this to a proper 5-nominee category is beyond me. I know better (shut up, you know I do!), and have named these five my best of the year:

Review - Black Mass

After the better part of a decade squandered on commercially shiny yet artistically hollow multiplex vehicles, Johnny Depp has reemerged from the abyss and has his steely blue, contact-lensed eyes on awards validation in Black Mass. Though hardly a one-man show, all eyes are on Depp as the strictly criminal South Boston gang lord James 'Whitey' Bulger.

A wily machinist of the Irish mob with purported psychopathic tendencies, who manipulated a dubious informant alliance with the FBI to expand his own bloody empire throughout the 70s and 80s, Bulger provides the 52-year-old actor's juiciest opportunity in years. Resembling a grim spectre of death – capped with prosthetic fivehead and darkened eye sockets – he commands his scenes with quiet malice, hissing a sinister Southie brogue through blackened teeth.

Longtime devotees of Depp and his famously eccentric characters may hope that the inevitable "comeback" narrative set to unfold around his awards campaign takes. But they'd also be the first to admit that such an angle is sheer media-generated poppycock. Even when prestigious material eluded him, he's never stopped being one of the most ubiquitous and bankable stars in the industry.

Whether or not the quality of his performances have been as consistent as his mere presence is subjective of course, but Black Mass is at least a return to the sort of movies that serious film-lovers can get behind.

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.

'Guardians' & 'Budapest' Each Win Pair of MHG Awards in Tight Race for Oscar

Of the five feature film categories that the Makeup & Hairstylists Guild uses to distinguish the year's best achievements in their field, two apiece were won by Oscar nominees Guardians of the Galaxy and The Grand Budapest Hotel.

I suppose this does little to clear up that super tight category, except perhaps to confirm that the transformative work in Foxcatcher, though effective, is a bit too subtle to trump those showier accomplishments.

Birdman, meanwhile, got a nifty tip of the hat for contemporary hairstyling. Lots of wigs and stage dos in that movie. Nice call, MHG.

One Category at a Time: Makeup and Hairstyling

Usually, Best Makeup and Hairstyling can be a frustrating and unpredictable category at the nomination stage. Despite having the field of possible nominees pared down to a paltry seven in advance, many pundits fail to anticipate the final three nominees since this branch has a bit of a history of snubbing excellent makeup in excellent films in favour of commendable makeup in horrible films -- much to the vexation of Oscar completists everywhere, who hate having to sit through the likes of Click, Norbit, or The Lone Ranger.

Picking the winners, however, has usually been relatively easy. How can it not be, with only three options to consider (time to expand it to five, AMPAS!). I myself have guessed the winners correctly for eight consecutive years, a longer streak than I can boast in any other category, and I'm far from the only one with such a record. This is all very usual for Oscar prognosticators.

But this year, things are a bit unusual. In fact, they're downright topsy turvy. Not only are all three movies worthy contenders for their remarkable transformations, but all three movies are actually... good movies! And more unusual yet is that all three of them feel like potential winners, making this one of the true toss-up categories of the year.

Let's dive into the cases you could make for each nominee:

BAFTA Clarifies Some Races, Obscures Others

So the EE British Academy of Film and Television Awards just wrapped up not long ago, but you won't get to watch the ceremony until later tonight because for all their fine cinematic tastes, the organization still hasn't evolved past their daft custom of broadcasting the show after all the winners are all public knowledge. Get with the times, BAFTA!

Anyway, I'm not really interested in the program so much as the results. Boyhood shrugged off last night's possibly crippling DGA loss to keep its Oscar hopes afloat. Also winning for the film were Patty Arquette (lock) and director Richard Linklater (not so much a lock).

Other big winners include The Grand Budapest Hotel with five, and The Theory of Everything and Whiplash with three. Oscar frontrunner Birdman took home only a single honour for Emmanuel Lubezki's virtuoso cinematography.

But what I was hoping this last major precursor of the season could really do is help illuminate some of the Academy's more unpredictable races. The British Academy is, after all, similar in membership size to AMPAS, and can therefore offer some clues on what sort of films will appeal to a large group in certain categories.

My Award Nominations: Best Makeup and Hair

For as long as I've been compiling my own personal Oscar ballots (feels like I've been at it since infancy), I've stubbornly limited myself to three nominees for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. I suppose it grew out of mimicking the Academy at first, but now it doesn't seem to make sense that it's the only category with such a restrictive number of contestants. If you ever read Nate Rogers at The Film Experience -- which of course you do, because what Oscar-loving film buff doesn't? -- you know what I'm talking about. For years he's made very a logical argument for why the makeup branch should finally get with the times and expand its field to five nominees.

So I'm taking a page out of that book and expanding my own field to reflect the rest of my awards -- five per category. Maybe if I'm bored one day, I'll even go back in time and retroactively add a couple of deserving hair+makeup efforts to my nominees from years past (though the boredom would have to be tremendous). But for now, peruse the best of what 2014 had to offer:

Makeup and Hair Guild Nominations

The Academy's nomination balloting closes today, but the Makeup and Hairstylists Guild has chimed in before that final bell (there are four other guilds announcing next week, so their nominees will have no influence on Oscar).

This guild hadn't regularly given out awards for some time, until they decided to revive the tradition last year, honouring several films among which was the eventual Oscar winner Dallas Buyers Club.

Leading the field this year are Guardians of the Galaxy and Into the Woods, each receiving three nominations across five categories. Guardians is looking good for an Oscar nod (and possibly the win), but Into the Woods failed to even make the short list.

Besides Guardians, other Oscar finalists which find representation here include The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Theory of Everything each with a pair, and Foxcatcher and Maleficent each with a single citation for their transformative prosthetics. Noah and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 were shut out entirely.

One final side note before we dig into the nominees: This guild needs to do a better job with their categorizations. How do they determine what counts as contemporary as opposed to period makeup/hair, and how do they account for fantasy offerings? Hunger Games gets called period, while Guardians of the Galaxy gets called contemporary? I haven't exactly seen a lot of modern day folks walking around looking like this:

This was a problem last year too, which saw The Butler classified as contemporary and Dallas Buyers Club as period, but enough of that. On to this year's slate:

Seven finalists advance to Best Makeup and Hairstyling bakeoff

The makeup branch of the Academy has announced its seven finalists that will advance to the bake-off stage, from which three Oscar nominees will be chosen:

The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Foxcatcher
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Guardians of the Galaxy
Maleficent
Noah
The Theory of Everything

The only semi-surprising snub is Into the Woods (sight-unseen, I'm not in a position to judge whether this is a travesty of justice or justice being served), but most of the surviving contenders are hardly unexpected. Although I guess not many people would've seen Spider-Man 2 coming.

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.

Review - Guardians of the Galaxy

I know I'm super late to the space launch on this one, but it's not as though the Guardians of the Galaxy are going anywhere anytime soon. Having rocketed to the top of the domestic box office (and still climbing) in just one month of release, there's no arguing that Marvel Studios has yet another bona fide hit on their hands, but does the product really befit the hype?

Even if not, one can only congratulate Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige and director James Gunn (Slither) on their success. Unlike the reliably profitable Avengers universe that oils their movie-making machinery, Guardians of the Galaxy was a more commercially risky project, mining the farthest reaches of space for characters that would have anyone but comic book buffs scratching their heads.

My Award nominations: Makeup and Hair

Whatever the makeup branch of the Academy is doing, it has to stop. I know some people really adore how this branch constantly goes out of its way to honour outright terrible films that happen to have elaborate makeup work, but two years in a row now it has come at the expense of the actual best makeup jobs of the year. Last year it was the invisibly convincing period makeup of Lincoln that gave way to the obvious (and hardly buyable) prosthetics of Hitchcock on nomination morning. This year was even worse, as the best work of the year failed to even make the bakeoff! So now we have Academy Awards nominees Bad Grandpa and The Lone Ranger, which I wouldn't mind so much if their old age makeup didn't look so rubbery and fake.

Anyway, rant over. Here is the true Best Makeup and Hair of 2013:

Makeup and Hairstylists Guild winners

The Makeup and Hairstylists Guild handed out hardware for the first time in 10 years last night, and two of this year's Oscar nominees came away with winning honours; Bad Grandpa and Dallas Buyers Club, the latter of which I'm predicting to triumph with the Academy.

Winners and brief opinions after the cut.

One Category at a Time: Makeup and Hairstyling

The only thing predictable about the makeup branch is their unpredictability. It's often impossible to anticipate which celebrated film with excellent makeup will be shafted, and which critically dismissed films will make the cut at both the bakeoff and the nomination stage. Sometimes they go on a run of getting it right; The wins for The Wolfman and The Iron Lady are hard to dispute. Sometimes, they go on a run of getting it completely wrong; Last year's snub of Lincoln in favour of Hitchcock and this year's complete omission of Rush, The Butler, The Hobbit, and Lone Survivor from the bakeoff list is beyond embarrassing. As far as I'm concerned, only one of the three films that did survive this branch's questionable scrutiny deserves to be in the conversation, but hopefully that's the one that'll end up winning.