When presenting the Best Actress Oscar during the 75th Academy Awards, Denzel Washington famously said "by a nose" before announcing Nicole Kidman as that year's winner for her work in The Hours. It was a reference to the way that, throughout that awards season, the actress's prosthetic enhanced transformation into Virginia Woolf had caused much controversy. Some people appreciated how Kidman left vanity at the door and allowed herself to be made unrecognizable, while many others found it to be distracting. In any case, it was a good booster to her Oscar campaign. The quality of a performance notwithstanding, there are few things that the Academy loves more than beautiful celebrities de-glamming.
Unfortunately, as it sometimes happens, while the performer was showered in gold, the team of makeup artists that made the physical transformation possible was left unrecognized. In the case of The Hours, they were even made ineligible…
Researching the everchanging rules of the Best Makeup and Hairstyling Oscar is to dive headfirst into a pool of deep confusion. By 2002, the year of this month's Supporting Actress Smackdown and The Hours, there was a committee to decide which films were eligible and which works would go on to the bake-off phase of voting. Like other categories, including the Best Visual Effects one, the Makeup Oscar has a list of pre-nomination finalists that get to make a special presentation to the voting members of their branch. Many contenders make it or break it during these bake-offs, even though they are a tragically under-reported part of the awards race.
As part of its duties, the Makeup Award Rules Committee was the one to set the parameters for what was considered a makeup achievement back in 2002. Nowadays, the preponderance of digital effects may make the differentiation between CGI and practical makeup a bit hard to parse out and those concerns were already at the forefront of discussion in 2002 if the Academy rulebook is to be trusted. At this point, the committee was to change yearly and make multiple meetings to ascertain the eligibility of movies for the award. Only after that, were the finalists selected and the bake-off organized.
That's how things are supposed to happen, not how they always do. In 2002, after the preliminary meetings of the committee many a contender was ruled ineligible, and only two films were shortlisted, Frida and The Time Machine. There was no bake-off and both were nominated, with Frida going on to (deservingly) win the trophy. Still, to have only two nominees caused some ruckus and the category's rules were changed once more, making it obligatory for the committee to select seven finalists for the bake-off. This is especially strange when we consider how many makeup-heavy movies were among that year's Oscar champions.
There were the Middle Earth creatures of Lord of the Rings, the nineteenth-century bleakness of Gangs of New York, Chicago's 1920s glamour, and, of course, the transformative cosmetics of The Hours. The reasons for that last one's disqualification are infuriating for they revolve around Kidman's controversial nose. While the effect itself is the work of practical makeup, some digital touch-ups were done in post-production to make it seem perfectly seamless. That's all the committee needed to declare the entire movie ineligible, even though there's a lot of other showy work throughout, including Julianne Moore in old-age makeup.
The biggest award The Hours' makeup team got was a BAFTA nomination for the work of Ivana Primorac, Conor O'Sullivan, and Jo Allen. For O'Sullivan and Allen, the situation isn't so dire since they would eventually be Oscar-nominated for other movies. Primorac, however, is still without AMPAS recognition, despite having worked in many buzzy movies like Cold Mountain, Atonement, Sweeney Todd, The Reader, Anna Karenina. For the Anthony Minchella epic, the Tim Burton musical, and the movie that won Kate Winslet her Oscar, Primorac reached the finalist shortlist but she still missed the Academy Award nomination. Maybe next time she'll be luckier.
Do you think The Hours should have been a Best Makeup contender despite its digital touch-ups?