Daniel Crooke here to talk about the pitch-perfect Sound Editing and Mixing montages from this year’s Oscar ceremony that ended in shiny, chrome, and hugely deserved wins for Mad Max: Fury Road. Known to some fair-weather film fans as the mystery stuffing that clogs the airtime between Best Supporting Actress and Actor, the sound categories are often the most overlooked because they’re the least understood. This gives the producers of the Oscars a daunting task – explain the intricacies and differences of two finely tuned crafts and hope that the audience both understands those definitions and why sound is crucial to creating cinematic universes.
This year, the Sound montages demonstrated the transporting power of signals and noises and thrillingly distilled how exactly they’re shaped. More onomatopoeias after the jump...
The Sound Editing montage (or mixtape, really) directly focuses on the blink-and-you-miss-it quality that can come naturally to the parts of a film that aren’t named DiCaprio. But when pulled apart and isolated, it can be easier to hone in on the finer beauty of a performance in sound. As a quick definition, sound editing comprises the individual ingredients – the whirs, bangs, slices, and grinds. Sound mixing is the way you cook them all together – how much you use of each ingredient, whether to nuke it on a low or high temperature, in an oven or a Crockpot, anything that influences the overall taste and tone of the finished product. And considering the lead-based aggression on display in this year’s nominees, the dexterity of savory craft and instruction in the montages prove that you can make your bullet cake and eat it too.
In years of Oscar past, the most oft cited success story in unpacking this category was the year when The Dark Knight was used as a close reading to examine and explain the sound crafts. While this commanded a professorial tone, this year’s short attention span, flash cut cards were perfect for dispersing info in the Vine era. Diamond-cut and kaleidoscopic, the range of individual sounds – from The Martian’s clinky tinker toys to Sicario’s blunt, muffled impacts – makes a symphony of clackers and clangs that not only show the precision involved in creating one sound but their collective impact pressed up against each other.
While the Sound Mixing montage is not yet available online, it flowed perfectly from Editing's showcase of the pieces and Mixing's of the whole. Bridge of Spies instantly validated its place in the line-up, upping the terror, tangibility, and timing of its home invasion. One couldn’t help but wish Carol’s woozy, swoony car scenes or Steve Jobs’ weighty playings of the orchestra had made the list to quiet the roar. But, above all else, Mad Max: Fury Road was on display in full force – whereas The Revenant submerged its sound, Mad Max chewed it up, spit it back out into an industrial fan, and sprayed all over the audience’s eardrums.
Were there any also-rans this year whose voices you wish had made it into these sterling sequences?