93rd Academy Awards: Best Production Design
Thursday, April 22, 2021 at 11:31PM by Daniel Walber
Is it a good year for the Best Production Design category at the Oscars? Is it a bad year? What does the word “good” even mean? Or, for that matter, the word “year”? Certainly not the same thing as “eligibility period,” given the way things have shaken out with the 93rd Academy Awards. Pour one out for First Cow.
But I digress. We have five films nominated for Best Production Design, and they’re a relatively modest batch. There’s the eternal joke about the Oscars nominating movies for “most” rather than “best” design, but by some miracle that hasn’t happened this year...
The Father is set almost entirely in a single apartment, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in a recording studio. News of the World has very few interiors, most of them sparse, and Mank has surprisingly few sets for a drama of Old Hollywood. It’s like the opposite of last year’s winner, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
And then there’s Tenet. Sure, it has plenty of locations. It’s just that they all fall into one of two categories: Hilton or parking garage. Neither the geometric lounges nor the subterranean offices have much in the way of charisma, but that has never seemed like much of a priority. The whole film is like being trapped in a bank vault, but without at least the mercy of silence.
This is Nolan’s sixth film to be nominated in this category, the fifth with regular collaborator Nathan Crowley. But given that the Academy has yet to award their endless one-two punch of bland high-end furniture and deafening concrete, it’s hard to imagine Tenet pulling it off.
Sure, it has plenty of locations. It’s just that they all fall into one of two categories: Hilton or parking garage. Neither the geometric lounges nor the subterranean offices have much in the way of charisma, but that has never seemed like much of a priority. The whole film is like being trapped in a bank vault, but without at least the mercy of silence.
This is Nolan’s sixth film to be nominated in this category, the fifth with regular collaborator Nathan Crowley. But given that the Academy has yet to award their endless one-two punch of bland high-end furniture and deafening concrete, it’s hard to imagine Tenet pulling it off.
News of the World is also something of an also-ran. A few of the interiors are quite beautiful, framing Tom Hanks’s character as a lone (white) voice of sanity in a world still riven by the violence of the civil war. He just reads the news, but the design regularly frames him as a hero, a prophet, a saint.
Of course, he’s also something of an illusion, a symbol of cross-racial class solidarity that never materialized. Reconstruction went down in a wave of white supremacist violence, its death more a criminal act than a tragedy. And while it’s cool that the production team did quite a bit of research into Kiowa culture, it’s frustrating that the only Kiowa people to actually appear in the film arrive in the form of a silent, magical windstorm.
If I were voting, I’d probably cast my ballot for either The Father or Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Both productions are much more constrained than their competitors, but more ambitious in terms of concept.
A play adaptation is always a challenge. Designers have to adapt their sets to the cinematic form, without losing the compact power of the theater. It’s an opportunity to take little details and expand them into boldly resonant moments.
I’ll focus on just two. The first is the shifting tiles of the kitchen in The Father. It’s an early hint at Anthony’s shifting reality, an incomplete understanding of his own home. Production design is key to the gradual revelation here, as we learn to not necessarily trust what we see. It’s the same kitchen - or is it? It’s a grand gesture, a sudden and dramatic color swap that wrenches the source material into the realm of cinema.
The second is the air shaft in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which sits behind a locked metal door in the studio’s basement rehearsal room. It’s an instant metaphor, holding the grandiosity of the theater without ever feeling overbearing or obvious. Its purpose is almost utilitarian - to offer a physical escape for Levee (Chadwick Boseman). It’s a door that only exists to be broken down.
All of that said, I’d be shocked if any of the above films walks away with the Oscar. This is Mank’s award to lose, and I’m not especially mad about it. True, as I mentioned in my column, the cinematography undercuts the achievement. Why rebuild Xanadu if you’re just going to shoot it in hideous digital black & white? But the work itself is quite impressive.
OSCAR CATEGORY REVIEWS
- Picture
- Director
- Actress
- Actor
- Supporting Actress
- Supporting Actor
- Adapted Screenplay
- Cinematography
- Costume Design
- Makeup and Hair
- Original Song
- Sound
- Visual Effects
- Documentary Feature
- Shorts, Animated
- Shorts, Doc
- Shorts, Live Action
plus
- Um... who is winning best actress?
- Double acting nomination complications
- How often does Best Actor go to a non-Best Picture nominated film?
- New Oscar records
- History of Posthumous Oscars
- Oldest Best Actor Nominees of all time (two are from this year!)
- Oldest Best Supporting Nominees of all time (two are from this year!)
Reader Comments (6)
this was so interesting to read. I never thought of this group as "modest" though I did note the peculiarity of Ma Rainey making it despite like, two (?) sets.
i agree about Mank. Happy to see it win. The more i sit with that film the less i like its cinematography. I'm glad I didn't include it in my top 12 of cinematography this year (though i almost did... probably a default reaction to "black and white!" and default reactions should always be questioned.)
Not that I expected a nomination, but Promising Young Woman gets my vote for funniest Production Design. The decorations in Cassie’s family home and in the party cabin made me laugh pretty hard. And the grooviest pharmacy ever! The coffee shop, or what little we see of it, wasn’t bad either.
THE FATHER would easily score my vote.
Agree MANK will probably win, but I too would give this to THE FATHER. It is probably the only movie I've ever watched that I've immediately wanted to rewatch *just* to focus on the production design, and where the production design actually made me feel like I was losing *my* mind.
Again, I will shout out that this category is frankly ridiculous, because they ALWAYS overlook the imaginative, groundbreaking work in animated films. This year, Onward and Soul would totally deserve consideration. The most shameful snub? The LEGO Movie and its meticulous produciton design - even the smoke and the waves were made of bricks!
EMMA. should have been here. Mystified why it missed.