The Best Costume Design category at the Oscars tends to be a place where one can find idiosyncratic choices. While it's true the Academy has a taste for the extravagant and period-looking, the Costume Branch is usually unafraid of celebrating films otherwise ignored. That's how we get such wonderful nods like those for Bright Star's Regency fashions, I Am Love's early aughts glamour, Jane Eyre 's Victorian severity, and Mirror Mirror's fairytale lunacy.
This year, for the first time in the category's history, all five nominees are Best Picture contenders. The arguable quality of the designs aside, this is a sad state of affairs that makes the usually cool Best Costume Design category look tediously similar to all the others. In an attempt to right the Academy's wrongs and offer a more varied look at 2019's achievements in film Costume Design, here's an alternative set of nominees, none of which were shortlisted by the Academy...
Honorable Mentions: Downton Abbey's fashions are immaculate, Her Smell's chaotic stylings delights and Rocketman's razzle-dazzle is a feast for the eyes. However, there can only be five.
Speaking of which, here are five great feats of Costume Design that the Academy ignored in order to heap more nods upon some of the Best Picture nominees:
DOLEMITE IS MY NAME
Costumes designed by Ruth E. Carter
Clothes that function as character arcs and historical milieu, as cultural touchstones, sight gags and visual ambrosia for the audience that gazes upon them. Patterns explode all-over like a storm of color and everyone looks like the movie stars they are, even those whose bodies diverge from the conventional paradigms of starlets and matinée idols.
HARRIET
Costumes designed by Paul Tazewell
Great use of texture contrasts and evolving uses of fabric to denote the passage of time and the main character's transformations. A wardrobe that works as an invocation of the historical past at the same time it appeals to a sense of cinematic iconography like that seen in the western classics of yore.
HUSTLERS
Costumes designed by Mitchell Travers
As I'd previously written in an FYC piece: "As Janet Jackson announces at the start of the movie, Hustlers is a story about control. Mitchell Travers understood that and the true genius of his costumes is how they delineate this very same dynamic. Forgive the cliché, but in this movie, a fur coat is never just a fur coat."
MIDSOMMAR
Costumes designed by Andrea Flesch
The perversion of Scandinavian folkloric attire is this nightmare's showiest sartorial choice, but it's far from being the only meritorious one. The way the American outsiders are dressed is a marvel all on its own, making them into illustrations of modern maladies and vices ranging from the weight of grief in grey cotton to the evils of selfish men in Henley shirts. The climatic mountain of flowers is the cherry on top of this poisonous dessert.
PETERLOO
Costumes designed by Jacqueline Durran
A snapshot of History that encompasses everyone from the downtrodden that starve on the streets to royalty draped in perfumed silks and scratchy lace. Few period films have so vividly captured the reality of an entire society just in the way everyone is dressed, the different fabrics that enclose their bodies and the varying silhouettes that transform them into representatives of their different classes.
As a bonus, here are five wonderfully costumed films that weren't in the Academy's eligibility list, despite opening in the US in 2019:
BIRDS OF PASSAGE
Costumes designed by Catherine Rodríguez
IN FABRIC
Costumes designed by Jo Thompson
MARY MAGDALENE
Costumes designed by Jacqueline Durran
THE SOUVENIR
Costumes designed by Grace Snell
SYNONYMS
Costumes designed by Khadija Zeggaï
What would your Best Costume Design ballot look like?