Pt 2: New Oscar Trivia, Stats, and Curiosities
Tuesday, March 1, 2016 at 4:00PM Picking up where we left off after the headliner categories. But click not away. The below the line crafts and specialty categories are just as important and trivia-interesting. I promise.
FOR THE EYES
Production Design: Colin Gibson, Mad Max: Fury Road
Makeup and Hairstyling: Mad Max: Fury Road
Costume Design: Jenny Beavan, Mad Max: Fury Road
Jenny Beavan previously won the costume category for another perfect film A Room With a View. Not since arguably Dianne Wiest has a two time winner won for such polar opposite achievements. Yes both of Wiest's Oscars are from Woody Allen pictures but those star turns couldn't be more different stylistically / emotionally / pscyhologically. Mad Max Fury Road is also the first sci-fi winner EVER in this category... unless you count Star Wars (1977) though some people prefer lumping Star Wars into the fantasy genre rather than sci-fi... and there have been multiple fantasy winners.
I can't think of any interesting stats to go with the Makeup and Production Design Oscars but they were richly earned, don't you think?
More after the jump including further Star Wars coincidences...
Margaret Sixel (Mad Max) on Sunday night. Marcia Lucas (Star Wars) and other winners with Farrah Fawcett at the 1977 Oscars
Film Editing: Margaret Sixel, Mad Max: Fury Road
Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki, The Revenant
Visual FX: Ex Machina
Margaret Sixel is the second woman to win this category for editing her husband's films. The first was Marcia Lucas who won Editing for George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) after a nomination for her work on his American Graffiti. (They were married before they were famous when they were both in their twenties. They divorced in 1983 after Return of the Jedi.) Please to note: This comparison is in no way meant to cast shade on Sixel & Miller's relationship as they have been working together for 30 years and married for 20)
Meanwhile Lubezki became the first and only cinematographer to win three consecutive Oscars. John Toll previously won back-to-backs for Legends of the Fall and Braveheart in the 1990s. (Mexican filmmakers have been having a GREAT Oscar run of late in the past ten years with Cuaron, Del Toro, & Iñárritu all winning Oscar love between 2006-2015)
Manuel already covered how unusual Ex Machina's win actually was.
THE SPECIALTIES
Documentary: Amy
Animated Feature Film: Inside Out
Foreign Language Film Son of Saul (Hungary)
You guys. What are we going to do about the Documentary Oscar? This is the 3rd time in just 4 years that the Best Documentary Feature has gone to a film about the music industry. This is getting ridiculous! It's like when we had all those years in a row when Cinematography suddenly became Visual FX Part Two. I suppose one could argue that this run of music films winning is coincidence but I think not. It reads like voters voting without having seen all the nominees -- which is likely. Oscar has been relaxing the rules in its specialty categories so you're no longer required to prove that you've seen them all before voting which is kind of a shame (as that should be the rule for every category). Music docs are the most accessible and mainstream and relatable especially if you haven't seen the pictures. Who doesn't have feelings about Amy Winehouse, you know?
The Animated Feature category has been around since 2001, the inaugural year featured Pixar losing which in no way became indicative of the general tenor of that category. In the now 15 years of winners in this category Pixar has won 53% of the time. Or, perhaps a more telling statistic: In years in which Pixar had an eligible release they have won 66% of the time (in only two years were they eligible and not nominated... 2011's Cars 2 and 2013's Monster's University)
As for Foreign Film, France ended their longest drought of nomination-free years with Mustang but they're still suffering from their longest drought ever in terms of win. Their last winning film was the Catherine Deneuve vehicle Indochine (1992). Meanwhile Hungary, once a frequently nominated country, ended their own longest nomination drought (nearly 30 years!) and won their second Oscar in the category. Their first was for the theater drama WW II film Mephisto (1981). I haven't done the research but it would probably be fascinating / scary to tabulate how often World War II centric films have won this category. It's still a very frequent topic of submissions each year from all over.
FOR THE EARS
Ennio Morricone with his Honorary Oscar a decade back. Now he's won a competitive Oscar, too.
Original Score: Ennio Morricone, The Hateful Eight
Original Song: "Writing’s on the Wall," Sam Smith, Jimmy Napes for Spectre
Sound Mixing: Mad Max: Fury Road
Sound Editing: Mad Max: Fury Road
With his win for The Hateful Eight, Morricone becomes (we believe) the oldest competitive Oscar winner of all time. He is 87 years old. (We haven't been able to find confirmation on this as Oscar's official stats for age only deal with actors and directors but many experts believe it to be true so it probably is.) The oldest winner in any acting category is Christopher Plummer who was 82 when he won for Beginners and the oldest winning director is Clint Eastwood who was 74 when he took his second directing statue for Million Dollar Baby.
Deborah is cooking something up about Oscar & Bond but for now let's note that "Writing's on the Wall" is only the second Bond song to ever win the Oscar. Which is such the headscratcher. Why did they previous ignore Bond songs, so many of which are stellar, and why on earth did they love this one, which nobody else seems to love?
As for Sound Mixing and Sound Editing. It's still unclear to TFE how the Sound branch in the Academy convinced Oscar to allow them two categories. Yes, the disciplines are different but so are, say, Production Design and Set Decoration as well as Makeup and Hairstyling and several disciplines are combined under Visual Effects tent. But those artists all have to share categories. The Sound branch themselves hasn't done much to convince the world at large that they're different disciplines either (though they are) since their nominations lists in the two categories are usually very similar.
SMALL SAMPLE SIZE
Both categories have changed titles and shape over the years but statistically, ignoring title changes, Sound Mixing has been around since the 3rd annual Oscars. Sound Editing stretches back only to 1963 but it didn't really become a proper category with annual winners and nominees until 1988. (in the years between 1963 and 1987 there were several years where there was only a winner and no nominees or they skipped the category entirely. Things stabilized in 1988 and the statues often went to separate films. This was partially because the makeup of their competition was different since Mixing had 5 nominees and Editing only 3. The totally equal categories (always 5 nominees for both every ingle year) dates back ONLY to 2006 so we have exactly 10 years of truly balanced history. In that short sample size, the same film has won both categories 60% of the time. The only time a film wins Sound Mixing without a parallel Editing nomination is when its a music film (Whiplash, Les Misérables, Dreamgirls) and the only time a film wins Sound Editing without a Mixing nomination it when it's a military film (Letters From Iwo Jima, Zero Dark Thirty)... no exceptions!
FOR THE SHORT ATTENTION SPANS
The Bear Story men winning gold
Animated Short Film: Bear Story
Live Action Film: Stutterer
Documentary Short: Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness
I correctly predicted all three of these categories this year totally shocking myself since none of my predictions were the overall agreed upon frontrunner if you look at punditry charts on sites that collect them! (The most frequently predicted were: Sanjay's Super Team, Shok, and Body Team 12)
Bear Story marks only the second Oscar win for Chileans. The first was Claudio Miranda for the cinematography of Life of Pi (2012). Gabriel Osorio and Pato Escala Pierart, the handsome young men behind Bear Story, have their own producition company called Punk Robot so keep an eye out for that studio. An Oscar win could go a long way... especially with animation that impressive.
During her acceptance speech for Girl in the River, Pakistani filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy noted that this was her second Oscar which prompted some curiousity: How often do people win that Doc Short category twice? Not too bloody often! In fact it's only happened four times and she's the first woman to pull off a double. The double winners:
Walt Disney - Alaskan Eskimo (1953) and Men Against the Artic (1955)
Charles E Guggenheim - The Johnstown Flood (1989) and A Time for Justice (1994)
Robin Lehman - Don't (1974) and End of the Game (1975)
Sharmeen Obald Chinoy - Saving Face (2011) and A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness (2015)
Obaid-Chinoy is also the only Pakistani Oscar winner.
It is my firm wish that someday Americans -- particularly Americans with big media platforms -- will learn to embrace intersectionality and stop their binary black vs white thinking. And stop saying "the all white Oscars" It's such a disservice to filmmakers of all colors and ethnicities who are not famous but have been honored for their achievements. This year alone we had Middle Eastern, Indian, and Latin American winners. Don't negate their achievements just because they aren't famous actors, please.
Reader Comments (25)
The Academy didn't love Sam Smith's song. They didn't want to give Gaga an Oscar. They didn't want to make Fifty Shades of Grey an Oscar winning movie. So the Bond song won by default since the Academy clearly felt the two uninvited to perform nominees were irrelevant.
Another: "The Hateful Eight" becomes only the second Best Original Score winner this century that wasn't also nominated for Best Picture. The other one was "Frida" in 2002.
I feel Sound Editing and Sound Mixing should be combined and a new category for stunts should be introduced (the excuse that there are not enough stuntpeople in the Academy to constitute a branch is a stupid chicken and an egg situation. If there are not enough stuntpeople, then invite more in!). If the makeup and hair people don't mind sharing a category, the sound people shouldn't mind either.
Thanks for this, you touch on a number of craft categories that casual film goers just don't care about.
Jenny Bevan & Margaret Sixel both contributed so much to the success of MM:FR. That's one of the best edited action films ever. Bevan went from "Bonnets & corsets" to a dystopic future.
What do we do about the problem of music documentaries being the most popular, and easiest to watch? Go back to a restriction on the voting, clearly this new version of the rules is not working.
I've done both sound editing and mixing, and the academy could merge the categories into one and call it "Sound Design". Or they go back to just the sound branch voting on the winners. The Brutally Honest Oscar Ballots at The Hollywood Reporter demonstrate that the academy membership often abstain or vote blindly. Since they admit to their ignorance they wouldn't mind if it went to the branch voting.
Film is an international medium, and I echo your sentiments that reducing the conversation to White vs.Black Oscars doesn't do justice to the global audience and nominees who come from all over the world.
<"Writing's on the Wall" is only the second Bond song to ever win the Oscar. Which is such the headscratcher. Why did they previous ignore Bond songs, so many of which are stellar, and why on earth did they love this one, which nobody else seems to love? >
Indeed. And "Goldfinger," which Dame Shirley Bassey performed on the Oscars three years ago, wasn't even nominated!!!
Love the Photoshopped Helena Bonham Carter in the picture with Furiosa & Mad Max - nice attention to detail !
I think that Sharmeen Obald Chinoy gave the best acceptance speech of the night. I wanted to watch her movie after that. I can't say the same for the other films that won.
As I noted to Nathaniel on Twitter, I find it highly unlikely that they will do anything about the documentary category. The doc category that they have now is exactly the category "they" wanted for years since the 1990s when snubs for films like PARIS IS BURNING and HOOP DREAMS embarrassed them enormously. They finally have a category that nominates *and* awards the win to the 'blockbuster' of the bunch. It's unlikely they'll think there is a problem when the biggest docs of the year are winning year in year out and staving off calls of "irrelevancy" or whatever else people want to say about categories that don't follow the status quo. Like when NO MAN'S LAND or THE LIVES OF OTHERS won in foreign language film over much more fancied opponents, they simply want to reward the big film of the year and say "hey, we did our part."
It wouldn't bother me so much if, like you say, the big docs of the last four years have been all about music. SUGARMAN, 20 FEET FROM STARDOM and AMY are all good movies to varying degrees, but the fact that they're the biggest doc hits of the year (outside of a Disney Nature doc or a tween concert doc) is significant of the fact that music documentaries are the easiest to get funded, produced, made, screened at festivals, picked up by cashed up distributors, and then seen by audiences. Anybody who is a fan will go see them (watch them on DVD/streaming), and festivals will pick them up whether they're good or bad because they know they can easily sell out a film like that.
So I think it's a mix of problems between the Academy themselves and simply the mechanics of documentaries in the theatrical landscape. It certainly won't help if Netflix continue to only give their movies qualifying runs. I wonder if they're aware how much cache a doc can get from having box office success.
I don't mind music documentaries winning Oscars. I mind when a music documentary wins an Oscar over a significantly better music documentary at the ceremony. Yes, I'm sure Amy gave everyone the warm feels and bitter sting of the early loss of Amy Winehouse. What Happened, Miss Simone? evoked the same emotional intensity with a much larger subject and a much tighter edit. Amy was probably my least favorite of the documentary nominees and, for me, felt like exploitation. Yes, let's string together a bunch of private videos of a troubled star and call it a documentary. That's totally not crass or questionable at all.
As a kid I resented Jenny Beaven for winning the Oscar that, in my opinion, belonged to Theadora Van Runkle.
Nat, Thanks for all the work in finding and writing up all this information.
I am fine with mixing disciplines within a category. It makes the decision about difference not just about best.
So I would like a best choreography category which could be stunts or dance or slapstick comedy or sport or .. . I know that won't happen.
Film is an international medium, and I echo your sentiments that reducing the conversation to White vs.Black Oscars doesn't do justice to the global audience and nominees who come from all over the world.
Fuck the global audience. Are foreign distributors looking to diversify their ensemble productions with non-white faces? Are they interested in seeing Viola Davis leading movies --- or is it easier for them to embrace the new Jennifer Lawrence in waiting? The Oscars were never about being these important cultural things. The are a marketing tool that has less significance as time marches on and movies themselves lose a lot of their cultural value to the multiplex crowd who are stuck with remakes of movies made twenty plus years ago. White America continues to dance around systematic white supremacist oppression. Until this can be hashed out everyone else is begging for when is it my turn and the truth is they likely won't it because the powers that be continue to operate as business as usual.
Everyone: Craziest thing that hasn't yet happened in costume design? A superhero movie. I get that any argument for Picture or Leading Performance is probably a decade or so away (the MCU is in it's middle stretch of "not new, but not a respected friend" and WB's efforts with DC right now are so specifically embarrassing that I call it the DCXU), but how has costume design not happened even once? Batman Returns. Watchmen. Captain America: The First Avenger. It's a genre BUILT for costume design noms and it's going to be more painful the longer it goes.
I looked at all the winners of the Foreign Language category and found 12 that were World War 2 centric, or had it as a main theme. I was a little surprised that there weren't more. I also found 28 films among the other nominees.
3rtful - Normally I ignore you, but you are trolling pure and simple. Stop it.
Don't use swear words. Film is an international business, and an art form with a global audience. That happens to be a fact.
Do not use my words as some excuse to go into a rant against those of us in other countries who make up that audience. I am Canadian and I do not deserve to bear the brunt of your anger, nor will I accept your rude behaviour.
You are always complaining that no one listens to you or discusses any subject with you.
If you wish to engage in reasonable discussion you must apologize to me as soon as possible.
You also owe an apology to Nathaniel who provides this wonderful site.
Thank you.
"Oscar has been relaxing the rules in its specialty categories so you're no longer required to prove that you've seen them all before voting which is kind of a shame (as that should be the rule for every category)."
You're probably right that this isn't great for the documentary category but it's done wonders in Foreign film. We've had five straight years of the most widely acclaimed film winning after a long stretch of strange choices like The Counterfeiters and Departures.
MJS -- hmmm. well i would argue that that's more because of the changes they've made in the nominating process. we've had better nominees after all the tinkering they've done with the committee process.
I don't understand why everyone is pretending that the Lady Gaga song was better than The Writing on the Wall? Both are equally shit and both performances (in terms of singing) were sub par.
I love that Jenny Beavan won. So refreshing (and of course Star Wars is sci-fi!).
It's nice to see that the big action movies of this year, Mad Max and Star Wars, were edited by women.
I agree with one Sound award and calling it Sound Design, but if they can't do that, can't they at least call them something so that people can understand what they are? So Sound Mixing becomes Sound Recording and Sound Editing becomes Sound Effects? Oh well, it's not like most people care anyway, and I've always said that sound is the most difficult thing to get right in a movie, hence all the constant looping.
I've written about this before, but Amy was produced in terribly bad taste and was wholly misguided in its pursuit of "documentary." The winners' speech reiterated the fact that it was made as a hagiography to her tragedy and virtues as a person. They had absolutely no shame or self-awareness about stating why they made the movie.
That's not what making a documentary is about. I'm almost embarrassed for those filmmakers if they genuinely believe that's a legitimate premise for documentary films. See "What Happened, Miss Simone?" as proof that you can explore complicated icons without writing a love letter.
Like "here is our subjective opinion of Amy Winehouse and a variety of clips/interviews/details that support it."
Phoe -- i dunno. At least Gaga stayed on key. (but agreed that neither song is particularly good. The two non-performed songs were way better songs.)
Is Mad Max really Sci-Fi though? It has elements sure but I'd consider it more purely an Action movie. I don't think a real Sci Fi film has won Production Design yet and the last real Sci-Fi film to be nominated in this category was Gattaca in 1997.
Steph Bello: Yeah, there's no tech on display in Mad Max we couldn't create today. To call Mad Max sci-fi is super loose. The tightest summary of it would be "Non-sci-fi post Apocalypse". By the tightest definition of sci-fi? (Where the work exists to explore what a genuinely new technological paradigm means for the world.) Yeah, Gattaca is the last. If you loosen it up slightly beyond that tight boundary, Interstellar and The Martian count. (They're future set, but they don't really want to "explore" what a new technology would mean.) How Gravity counts as sci-fi at all, however, perplexes me. None of the tech is new. They're in earth orbit. I agree with Cuaron. Pacific Rim is sci-fi. Gravity is just a survival story in space with modern tech.