by Nathaniel R
9 time Academy Award nominee Ren Klyce at work
While the 93rd Annual Academy Awards are largely a very exciting 'fresh voices!' kind of competition, all Oscar years barring the very first couple (haha) have some regular nominees show up. In the absence of a Streep or a Williams this year the only people in the double digits are songwriter Diane Warren and a couple of sound guys (more on sound in a minute). But we wanted to highlight count three men with 9 nominations today. Only one of them, has previously won. They are...
Docter promoting Soul
PETE DOCTER
Soul's Best Animated Feature bid brings him his 9th nod. He has won twice.
Born and raised in Minnesota, Docter transferred to CalArts in his second year of college (from which many artistic giants have emerged). He joined Pixar when he was just 21 as only the third animator they hired. His nominations come in three separate categories: Screenplay (Toy Story, WALL•E, Inside Out, Up), Animated Short (Mike's New Car), and Animated Feature (Monsters Inc, Up, Inside Out, and Soul). He currently holds the record for most nominations in the Best Animated Feature category (four) and should he win for Soul as he's expected to, he will hold the record for most wins (3) breaking the current five-person tie for most wins (2) which he shares with four other men... all of whom won for Pixar films.
While Docter is obviously an amazingly gifted man, he has been very generously honored by the Academy. Given voters undying loyalty to Disney/Pixar we must assume he's heading for his 3rd landslide win. We wonder what it would take for Oscar voters to look beyond Disney/Pixar. Will great smaller miracle working animation houses like Laika (5 nominations), Cartoon Saloon (4 nominations), Les Armateurs (2 nominations), and American Empirical Pictures (2 nominations) ever be able to score a win in this category? It's not that they've never deserved it.
James at the piano
JAMES NEWTON HOWARD
News of the World's Original Score brings him his 9th nod. He has yet to win.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, it never should surprise us given that it's a 'family town' but we were today year's old when we learned that he's the older brother of the actor Arliss Howard (so terrific this past year as Louis B Mayer in Mank). And, thus, he's the brother-in-law of the one and only Debra Winger. Just some fun trivia to put a bounce in your step this morning... well, if you love showbiz trivia and we think you do.
Howard has been working in movies and television since the early 1980s but spent some of his early professional years more focused on the music biz (he toured with Elton John and also worked with the rock group Toto). By the early 90s he was a well-established movie composer with Emmy and Oscar nominations to his name. He was twice Oscar-nominated for Best Song in the 1990s (Junior, One Fine Day), but the bulk of his nominations come in the Best Original Score department. His previous score nominations: The Prince of Tides (1991), The Fugitive (1993), My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), The Village (2004), Michael Clayton (2007), and Defiance (2008).
Ren Klyce in 1984. He was already friends with David Fincher and they'd make several classics together starting a decade later.
REN KLYCE
Mank and Soul bring him his 8th and 9th nominations this season. He has yet to win.
Born in Japan and raised in California, Klyce was introduced to the world of sound at the age of nine by his godfather who was hired to work on George Lucas's THX-1138 (1971) literally next door -- Lucas had rented a house beside Klyce's for post-production. About a decade later he became friends with a then 19 year-old David Fincher when they were both on the crew of a George Lucas produced animated movie called Twice Upon a Time (1983). Their friendship blossomed into an incredible cinematic partnership. Fincher's movies sound incredible. Strangely despite plentiful Oscar nominations, Klyce has yet to win.
Given that Oscar has combined its sound categories "Sound Mixing" and Best Sound Editing" are now just one called simply "Best Sound", the nomination tally for people in this field will no longer skyrocket so quickly. Klyce has a combined 9 nominations, four of which come from double nominations (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Star Wars Episode VIII The Last Jedi). He also scored an sound editing nod for Fight Club and mixing nods for both The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Social Network. Yet even with the combined category this year Klyce's work is still bliss to the ears of Academy members as he's double-nominated again for his work on two extremely different assignments: Soul and Mank.
Are you a fan of these three artists?
What would it take for Klyce or Howard to win exactly? What would it take for anyone BUT Pixar employees to win in Animated Feature?