One Category at a Time: Best Production Design

This feels like one of those tight categories in which literally any of the five nominees could win. The usual period dressings are conspicuously absent, precursors have been split every which way, and said precursors have not been all that informative in recent years anyway; Three Best Production Design winners of that last ten didn't have any of the ADG, BAFTA or Critics Choice Awards in hand before taking the Oscar.

Moonlight Wins USC Scripter, plus ADG Winners

Moonlight's Barry Jenkins and Tarrell Alvin McCraney won the USC Scripter Award last night, which honours the best page-to-screen adaptations of the year by giving prizes to both the screenwriter and the author of the original source material.

Oddly, the Academy still included McCraney in the Oscar nomination as well, but if you're willing to give McCraney story credit on this project (for writing a play that never got produced), doesn't that mean you're treating it like an original screenplay? I don't think too many people are going to complain about McCraney standing alongside Jenkins with an Oscar in hand two weeks from now, but I'm curious to hear where others stand on this question.

My Award Nominations: Production Design

It'll be hard for the Academy's designers branch to come up with a bad nominee for Best Production Design this year, even if it doesn't match very closely with my own ballot (outlined after the cut). There's just so much good work out there.

Art Directors Guild nominations

The ADG has joined the chorus. While it's not unheard of for production design efforts that miss with the guild to find Oscar love, it doesn't happen often (only three films have pulled that trick in the last five years), so that doesn't bode well for Silence, Rules Don't Apply or Live by Night.

Let's take a look at the three feature film categories after the jump...

One Category at a Time: Production Design

Without a doubt, the toughest below-the-line awards to call this year are the design categories. The critics, the guilds, and BAFTA have unanimously lined up behind one film in both Costume Design and (today's topic) Production Design. But will the Academy really go there in either design field, let alone both?

ADG Winners

The Art Directors Guild capped off the guild festivities for the weekend, handing The Revenant Best Period Production Design, Mad Max: Fury Road Best Fantasy Production Design, and The Martian Best Contemporary Production Design.

I'm really not sure where the Oscar race stands at this point. Mad Max has the lion's share of awards thus far, but it would make such an atypical winner, deserved or not. Same applies to The Revenant. Both are likely to take a bunch of craft categories, but this particular category? The Academy almost never gives it to a movie predominantly set in exterior locations. I'm still looking to Bridge of Spies to potentially pull a Lincoln, but I think I'll wait for BAFTA to weigh in.

My Award Nominations: Production Design

This weekend I'm tackling the design categories and cinematography, and as always there's an excellent variety of work that spoils us for choice. Behold my picks for the Best Production Design of the year.

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.

My Award Nominations: Best Production Design

I tell ya, it broke my heart to omit just about every title that you'll see in the 'just missed' section of this post, but that's the type of year it's been for production design. Outstanding work in too many films. I ultimately had to choose those whose sets and environments were engrained into the narrative identities of the stories they were telling, but it doesn't make it any easier to snub some other worthy effort.

Anyway, enough mourning the snubbees. Onto the five that did survive this brutally competitive melee for only five slots in Best Production Design.

'Budapest', 'Birdman', & 'Guardians' Take Top ADG Honours

Production designer Adam Stockhausen continued his unstoppable march towards the Oscar by picking up the Art Directors Guils Award in period design for his scrumptious work on The Grand Budapest Hotel. Honestly, enough said on this category already. Nothing's gonna beat this one. No one's gonna argue with that.

In the other categories, Birdman continued its recent guild surge by winning the award for contemporary design, thanks to Kevin Thompson's enormous Broadway recreations. And Guardians of the Galaxy's Charles Wood pulled off a mini-coup by snatching away the fantasy award from Oscar nominees Interstellar and Into the Woods.

One Category at a Time: Production Design

2014 was, in my opinion, a pretty awesome year for production designers. There was an extremely rich variety of work on display, from trippy sci-fi to austere period pieces, and from autere sci-fi to trippy period pieces! It's a shame that only five can be honoured by the Academy (the guild has three categories over which to spread the wealth), because I can definitely think of at least ten worthy of a nomination.

And yet, as outstanding as so many sets were in so many movies this year, there's only one that has rightful claim to this award. And fortunately, that's the one on track to win.

ADG nominees

The announcement everyone will have their eyes on today is the Producers Guild nominations, but in the meantime the Art Directors Guild has sounded off on the year's best production design. Will our Academy's Best Production Design ballot be a sampling of these fifteen films, or will one or two titles passed over by the guild make their way to an Oscar nod? I notice that Mr. Turner was ignored in the Period category (um... what?), but there's always one guild snubbee that gets a second wind.

Check out the nominees with some commentaries/wild guesses after the cut.

Review - Foxcatcher

If you're a fan of the sport of wrestling, you may be familiar with the story of the Schultz brothers, a pair of Olympic champs who caught the eye of a millionaire philanthropist following the '84 L.A. Olympics.

But you needn't be a wrestling buff to appreciate this stranger-than-fiction true story, brilliantly dramatized by Cannes prize winner Bennett Miller in Foxcatcher. Just like his swell previous feature Moneyball, what Miller has achieved here is a sports movie that's not actually about the sport, but about something far bigger and more elusive. Incidentally, like Moneyball was in 2011, Foxcatcher is also one of the finest films of the year.

Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) is obsessed with being the best, but doomed to never feel like the best. Even his Olympic gold medal seems outshone by that of his older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), whose personal life is far more fulfilled.

Dave is more famous, a better wrestler/coach, a happy family man, and still quietly exudes his protective instincts towards his baby bro. A beautifully staged sparring sequence early in the film between the two brothers tells us everything we need to know about their relationship with hardly a single word of dialogue.

Review - Fury

It is April, 1945. The second world war draws to an agonizingly bloody close on German soil. Materializing out of a haze of sunlight and gun smoke, a German officer atop a weathered white horse trudges through a scorched battlefield, floating in silence like a ghost amongst the dead bodies and burning debris. There's a sad beauty to this image that greets us at the onset of Fury, steeped in an eerie serenity that the film's title does not suggest.

Naturally, this moment ends in an abrupt and brutal fashion more typical to the rest of this rockem' sockem' war story. Written and directed by David Ayer, many of whose previous films and screenplays (End of Watch, Harsh Times, Training Day) have been gritty studies in rock-hard masculinity, Fury follows the perilous travails of a tank unit as it pushes the Allied advance deeper into enemy territory in the dying days of WWII.

Brad Pitt headlines as Sgt. Don 'Wardaddy' Collier, commander of a 30-ton M4 Sherman tank (the eponymous Fury, whose moniker is scrawled across the cannon barrel as if the bow of a ship) and its testosterone-oozing crew. This includes Shia LaBeouf as its devout trigger man, Michael Peña as its empathetic driver, and Jon Bernthal as its certifiable mechanic. No, not “certified”, “certifiable”.

Review - Snowpiercer

The notion that everybody has their preordained place in life, and that stepping beyond one's bounds leads to a collapse in social order, is probably not a popular opinion in our modern world. It's ironic then that this would be one of the themes central to Snowpiercer, the latest effort from Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho, a director who so defies categorization that it's impossible to imagine what his bounds would be, even if he ever had any. Never content to coast on a set track, he has delivered another singular and unique cinematic achievement, albeit an imperfect one.

Based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige, Snowpiercer is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which a radical atmospheric treatment intended to combat the effects of global warming has resulted in a new ice age, and the mass extinction of virtually all life on Earth. The only survivors of this cataclysmic cold snap are those who happened to be on board the Snowpiercer, a life-preserving locomotive that now circles the frozen world in perpetuity.

Review - The Grand Budapest Hotel

“There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity,” waxes Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson's pastry-lite eulogy for a golden pre-war age of chivalrous romanticism, classy refinement, and gaudy luxury.

Though now a desolate and scarcely frequented relic of a bygone era, the Grand Budapest was once the most lavishly appointed palace of 1930s Zubrowka – a fictional European nation on the brink of an unnamed war – where it was run by the fey and fastidious concierge Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and his faithful lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori). We hear Gustave and Zero's story as recounted by a much older Zero (F. Murray Abraham) to a curious author (Jude Law), whose subsequent writings of the interview are being read decades later by an anonymous student...

… But back to the story within the story within the story:

M. Gustave's suave gold-digging ways have won him the bequeathal of a priceless painting – the hilariously mundane “Boy With Apple” – from a recently deceased old dame (Tilda Swinton); Just one of Gustave's many wooed blondes. Intent on rescuing the art from the conniving hands of the old lady's son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) and the brass-armoured knuckles of his hit man Joplin (Wilem Dafoe), Gustave and Zero make off with the McGuffin in the name of historical preservation... until, that is, they decide a few seconds later to screw preservation and cash in on the painting.

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.

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: