Oscar Volley: Best Costume Design is all about aliens, monsters and demon twinks

Our Oscar volleys continue with the site’s weekly RuCappers, Cláudio Alves and Nick Taylor, tackling Best Costume Design…

Never trust a twink in oversized clothes and Coke bottle glasses with a hungry gaze.

CLÁUDIO: Hello, hello, hello, it's time to discuss my favorite Oscar category - Best Costume Design! And to keep the tradition going from these volley's last few seasons, why don't we start by describing a sartorial mélange of all nominees? Imagine me coming to you in Varang's war headdress and Marty Mauser's Coke bottle glasses. I'm also in a plus-sized cut of Smoke's azure-leaning ensemble, but instead of a 1930s suit jacket, I'm donning the powder-blue doublet from Hamlet's first staging. For extra accessories, let's go with the anachronistic Tiffany beetle jewelry with which Mia Goth adorns herself in Frankenstein.

What about you, dear Nick? What are you wearing, diva?

NICK: For this year’s runway, I’m seizing on the crimson death currents uniting these films…

The perfect outfit for an illicit tryst in Central Park.

The main dress is Jessie Buckley’s period blood-red dress, with Gwyneth’s lush red coat draped over it. The headpiece is Neytiri’s funeral veil, with my hair as lush and vibrant as ever underneath. Annie’s long necklaces break against all this red, but they also bring a dangerous amount of attention to my thick, beautiful neck. Of course, we’re wearing Oscar’s Isaac’s red leather surgical gloves, and of course, the heels are covered in blood. The smudged black eyeliner is giving “grieving mother,” while the pox I’m using as lipstick says “the plague’s getting me next.”

All in all, I say we’re ready to serve! Tonight’s category is Best Costume Design, starring four Best Picture nominees and a surprise fifth slot so unexpectedly discerning I still can’t believe it happened. Are you excited to rate the queens of 2025?

CLÁUDIO: I'm ready to rate, to rant, and to roar with applause. Because, despite the annoying Best Picture domination, this is a smashing group of nominees. Not just the films, but the artists themselves. On the one hand, you have two previous winners: two-time Oscar queen Ruth E. Carter, the most honored Black woman in Academy history, and Deborah L. Scott, who took the gold for Titanic way back in the 1990s. Both of them are back in the race with the directors with whom they won their little golden men - Ryan Coogler and James Cameron - making these honors something of a celebration of their longtime creative partnerships.

All the others are first-time nominees, coming into this awards conversation with a bit of an overdue reputation, as far as the industry and costume aficionados are concerned. Kate Hawley should already have been an Oscar nominee, if not a winner, for her previous collaboration with Guillermo del Toro, Crimson Peak. It's especially galling once you remember that the director's two live-action follow-ups to the 2015 Gothic horror both earned Best Costume Design nods for Luis Sequeira. Like fellow first-time nominee Malgosia Turzanska, Hawley spent some time on TV, earning an Emmy nod for The Rings of Power.

That Polish designer put her name on the map with the first season of Stranger Things, and should have crashed the Oscar lineup with The Green Knight or Pearl. Honestly, I'd have nominated her for Train Dreams rather than Hamnet, just to show what a good year Turzanska's been having. Our final nominee, Miyako Bellizzi, is the greenest designer in the quintet and finds herself in a similar position to Chloe Zhao's costumer. She's nominated for Marty Supreme, her third feature with Josh Safdie, but could have been recognized for The History of Sound or Bonjour Tristesse.

In the tragedy of HAMNET, Agnes is a lady in red.

Should we start dissecting the work and chances of the veterans or the newcomers? Which do you prefer?

NICK: First, let me echo your sentiments about the quality of this lineup, even with a dispiritingly heavy lean towards Best Picture nominees. This is a strong lineup, if not an especially inspired one, and having Frankenstein and Sinners as major nomination-getters means a lot of room has been made for horror cinema across the board. I will always love that, and Avatar: Fire and Ash makes the genre tilt even stronger.

With this summary out of the way, let's start with the new blood!  I'm with you on preferring Malgosia Turzanska's work in Train Dreams to her nominated costuming for Hamnet, but both films show her to great advantage. She had a real talent for adding recognizable through-lines of color, textile, and pattern to different eras, legible to modern eyes, while actively playing with our cultural understanding of those eras. In The Green Knight, she pushes towards alien grotesques, but in Hamnet (and Train Dreams), she makes spiritual connections with nature register at a very physical level, alongside the domestic dreams and material realities of the characters. The pared-down elegance of the costumes and the characters’ limited wardrobes feels like a happy medium between theatrical garbs and cinematic detail. 

Clothes are well-kept but still vulnerable to the elements. Agnes’s palette of red and orange, coppery like blood, exemplifies her earthiness and her impassioned spirit without being clichéd in either direction. I like watching the Shakespeare kids’ clothes to see how they incorporated their parents’ cuts or colors, and what the designs unique to them were communicating. Hamnet’s baby blues alone make my heart swell to think about. What say you, professional theatre costume designer? Oh, have you ever worked on a Shakespeare production? 

CLÁUDIO: Sadly, I have never done any Shakespeare on stage, only worked with his texts in the context of theater school exercises, some imaginary stagings that never left the conceptual phase. But I do love the Bard, and, despite my qualms with some adaptation choices in the last act, I am a fan of what Zhao accomplished. Those favorable feelings extend to the costumes, though within limits.

HAMNET re-imagines the first performance of HAMLET on stage.

Turzanska's best work in Hamnet comes in the color stories and textile manipulation you already mentioned. Part of me feels the pared-down period aesthetic is a bit of a cliché in itself, as is the muddiness of the palette when it's not drawing dramaturgy through echoing hues - Hamnet's blue giving way to Hamlet's unusual appearance in robin's egg rather than mourning black. If I saw any of these costumes out of context, they would be most unremarkable, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Period specificity is somewhat present, but rarely used in interesting ways - this designer has admitted in interviews that historicism doesn't interest her much.

The exception is the class divisions implicit in the Globe scenes, just by the quality of clothing, how the poor folks standing are faded by the elements, while the rich people in the balconies, somber as they are in dark neutrals, still look pristine and well-kept. Their garments haven't seen the sun too much, or mud, or the acid wash of sweat. Their starched collars are virile and bone white, rather than droopy, never weighted down by the grime of a commoner's everyday life.

I guess I see the value in the approach, even as I yearn for something a bit pricklier. From taking petticoats out of Agnes' skirts to eliminating codpieces, fashioning Will's trousers and footwear in ways that align with current ideas of masculinity, the costumes bridge the characters' 16th-century existence and our modernity. Yet, isn't the text already doing that? The performances, the focus on universal human experiences of loss? Couldn't it be more interesting to regard the past as a foreign country and still trust the audience to feel that connection? I'd have liked a bit more tension in the picture's aesthetic language. Because, while Agnes's disobedience of social mores makes sense, to have a similar level of simplification applied to other figures, Will, especially, detracts from what could have been a productive contrast. It's there, but it could have been so much more robust, perhaps alienating in that manner that always gets me going. 

Turzanska weaves sorrow into every joy of the Shakespeare family.

But it's good work, and I'm very happy for Turzanska. Since I want to move on from nitpicks, maybe we could both share our favorite individual costumes from the bunch. I considered the ink-dyed slashed leathers of Will's London ensembles, but I think I have to go with the children's improvised costumes for their backyard Macbeth. The fancy garb is fashioned out of baskets and brooms and whatnot, pieces of the same domesticity their father has relinquished in pursuit of a different life. In the playfulness, there's a touch of pain that almost seems stronger in retrospect. What's your standout from the Hamnet costume collection? What would you have modelled on the Oscar stage if they still did those presentations with people wearing the nominated fits? 

NICK: We have the same favorite! I take your point about Turzanska not pushing further for those alienating qualities, though I think that’s as much about her fulfilling Zhao’s directorial mandates. So much of Hamnet feels shorn of the novel's thornier aspects - the scrambled chronology, the sidelining of abusive parents - that I can at least feel comfortable saying the clothes are fulfilling their mandate.

If we're calling out favorites, I think my single favorite garment between any of these films is Oscar Isaac's gloves in Frankenstein. The shade of red looks like exposed musculature, repellent to behold, yet it's amazing how they take on a sensual undercurrent in his first encounter with the Creature. Even if the "blood on his hands" metaphor is relentlessly on the nose, their practical use in the operating room and the early stages of parenting make them more than their most literal meaning.

FRANKENSTEIN is a great movie for glove lovers.

It's certainly my favorite part of a film I have absolutely no time for. You mentioned your love of Kate Hawley's costumes for Crimson Peak, and from my perspective, I see a lot of opulence in service of embellishing some incredibly thin ideas about these characters and the thematic frameworks del Toro is using them in. I see a lot to appreciate in Mia Goth's costumes, but also felt a little silly watching this entomologist giving these on-the-nose about morality and human fragility while dressed like an insect. Because she relates to them, you know? Gorgeous exoskeletons, and the elasticity between sensuality and stiffness isn't nothing, but it's beating an undead horse to the highest degree. 

I do appreciate how the sleeves of Elizabeth's wedding dress give her a visual symmetry with the Creature's bandages, and how Hawley successfully gives her own spin to such iconographic pop culture figures throughout. She's not reinventing the wheel, but the costumes are one of the few contributions to give del Toro's giddy pastiche some distinctive stakes as an interpretation. The natty pinstripe suit Victor wears when collecting bodies from the hangman is a more unique, succinct character point on how he sees the business of death than the constant orations about his ego and inhumanity. And speaking of inhumanity, the Creature's giant fur coat and Polar expedition gear are about as memorable a movie monster as I've ever seen. It's a great silhouette, grounded in its practical applications in keeping a bitch cozy while still suiting this reality. All my grumbly attitude going into this, and here I am with so many compliments for this otherwise leaden adaptation. 

CLÁUDIO: I'd argue the choice to have Agnes in Hamnet run around without full skirts, stays, or hair covering is as much an on-the-nose signifier of a pretty basic idea (she's earthy and "not like other girls") as anything in Elizabeth's wardrobe. But unlike you, I don't find either choice deserving of a demerit because they are obvious. I like bold visualizations of simple ideas, especially when they pull from visceral reactions within the audience, be they identification, revulsion, attraction, or what have you.

Mia Goth dresses like an extension of the mossy set, a spectre of Nature in mourning.

Indeed, I'm all for the sartorial extravagance of Frankenstein and found endless delight in Hawley's costumes. To return to Mia Goth's dual role as the mad doctor's mother and love interest, there's a lot there beyond the entomological readings some of her costumes might evoke. First of all, by messing with the timeline as presented through fashion, the matriarch rots away and dies in the same late Regency that saw the first edition of Frankenstein be published. And then, Elizabeth embodies the more Romantic era of the second edition, whose ideas seem much more to del Toro's liking. It's a nifty trick that almost does more with the novel's troubled literary legacies than the screenplay.

Moreover, far from being reduced to a gal who dresses like bugs, Elizabeth's costumes are more about the natural world as a whole, in opposition to the man who defies rather than celebrates it. There's beetle jewelry and moth wings burnt into velvet capes, as well as feather headdresses and layered organzas printed to look like light reflected through water. The vegetation motifs and floral trims of early Victorian fashion appear in bonnets that also echo the shape of Mrs. Frankenstein's coffin. Her most striking style may well be the patterned silks whose geometrical lines are derived from geological studies. To me, she often looks like a malachite carving more than an insect.

You've already done a pretty good job of exalting the men's costumes, but there's still more to point out. Truly, in a film whose textual elements couldn't be more dire, the costumes are a rich text all their own. Consider the corseted back of Victor's waistcoats, exaggerated to look like a protruding spine that both mimics and mocks his creation. Or how Leopold's military past is always present, how the edges of some garments have decorative fraying that suggests fragility in contradiction with his projections of patriarchal might. You have to pay extra attention because Dan Laustsen does not believe in legible imagery or competent gaffers, but it's there. I'd go as far as saying that Hawley's probable victory will make her the best winner in this category since Ruth E. Carter won the Oscar for the first Black Panther.

Then again, my favorite of this quintet is actually Carter, too. Are you also a Sinners voter here, or do you feel AMPAS should spread the wealth and let a newbie take home the Academy Award? Does anyone really need three Oscars?

NICK: Fair point about Agnes, especially the lack of hair covering. Sinners would be my pick of the litter, making this the third award I’d give Ruth E. Carter for her collabs with Ryan Coogler. Their work together has produced some of the best American film craft of the last decade. As much as I categorically prefer seeing new blood win at the Oscars, and I’d be happy with any of these films taking the prize, I would be thrilled to see Carter take home another statue.

The "I Lied to You" scene is a whole FYC for Ruth E. Carter's genius.

Praising Ruth Carter’s ensembles, for me, usually begins at the edges and works into the main cast. I love how the Choctaw vampire hunters and the spirits summoned during “I Lied To You” have as much personality and cultural specificity as the main players. The relatively short timeframe of Sinners means our large cast of characters gets only one or two costumes to make themselves known to the audience. We get to watch these characters dash around, sweating under the hot sun and working hard for their corner of 1930’s Mississippi, before they don their best wares for a night out. Even the folks working at the juke joint are dressed to dance and savor their freedom alongside their patrons.

Carter’s costumes are one of several avenues Sinners uses to dramatize the thematic tension between Clarksdale’s nonwhite communities and the patina of “America” they’ve become enveloped in. The clash of worn denim and fitted suits beautifully dramatizes Smoke and Stack’s dissonance with their Delta roots, just as their own fits distinguish them far beyond the red/blue dichotomy. On a technical level, the wear and tear in Carter’s costumes is extraordinary to track, even before the fineries are soaked in blood. To make even this good of an impression underneath Autumn Arkapaw’s horrible lighting and framing is as magnificent an achievement as Hawley surviving Dan Lausten’s hideous filters in Frankenstein. Carter’s clothes are a marvel at every turn, and I’m excited to hear you go deep on them.

Annie’s two outfits might be my favorite clothes in Sinners, but I have a soft spot for Mary’s outfit in the epilogue, in no small part because I’m convinced Aja could pull that look off like nobody’s fucking business. Do you have a particular favorite?

CLÁUDIO: Even divorced from any storytelling context, I really love everything Carter put on Stainfeld. It's not often I'm surprised by period fashions, especially when they lean on historical accuracy like these ones do, but her ensemble at the train station is legitimately unusual. It's also very provocative despite how covered up it remains, which is a similar dynamic to her party frock, whose pannelling seems intent on drawing the eye towards the wearer's crotch, a touch of sordidness in a design that, at first glance, seems to pull toward classic elegance.

In SINNERS, the crowd's clothes sing their own tale.

But I concur, the best work Carter accomplishes might be with the crowd. It's not often you can say that about a production, not even a big-budget Hollywood one, as extras tend to be neglected or just deprioritized in relation to the main players. Yet, in Sinners, a lot of the sociological narrative is told through what the garments of those background players suggest. For example, while we're situated at the start of the 30s, most of the Black folks we see partying still wear the lines of the previous decade, even Lawson's Perline, while Steinfeld and Li model slightly more up-to-date fashions. That's not to say the other women are wearing degraded costumes, just that their best dresses aren't as regularly rotated out by new purchases and that they may have less access to the hot new trends.

This isn't just about racial lines either. Joan and Bert look even more demodé, with Lola Kirke practically donning a 1910s costume. Mosaku also appears to be wearing undergarments a couple of decades out of fashion, but, with her, it seems like an aesthetic choice, something a woman with a larger figure would probably do, purchasing new clothes while holding on to the comforts and supports of previous styles. There's an underlying confidence there, a comfort and strength that make perfect sense for Annie's character.

I could go on and on and on about these dynamics, and join you in praising Carter's contribution to the "I Lied to You" sequence. I'd argue the costumes are more important than the camerawork and choreography in conveying the idea of time collapsing into itself, past and present, and future communing. The way those apparitions disrupt the color palette's order up to that point is another great detail, a dissonance that invigorates the movie just when it needs to take us to heaven. If that moment is going to earn Göransson Academy Award #3, Carter should also get to go up the Oscar stage for a third time, too. It's to make up for the nominations she should have earned for School Daze, Do the Right Thing, What's Love Got To Do With It, Black Dynamite, and Dolemite Is My Name.

AVATAR ponders on the matter of grieving through an alien lens.

That being said, my petty side is rooting for an Avatar or Marty Supreme win. Mostly, because a certain musical's rabid stans spent a good part of the days following the nominations announcement shitting on Scott and Belliz's work, accusing it of being too simple or unsubstantial to deserve such plaudits. Fuck that noise. 

NICK: You say it’s not often you can praise a costume designer for their crowd work, and I completely agree, but it’s such a staple of Carter’s work that I wouldn’t know how else to appraise it. The extras in her films are always dressed like the protagonists of their own stories. She’s said as much in interviews, and it’s so rewarding to see this ethos bear fruit in each movie she works on.

I’m not interested in smack talk against Marty Supreme and Avatar: Fire and Ash’s nominations. The latter, in particular, is such a bizarre yet utterly deserving surprise. Deborah Scott’s established pattern of dressing each Na’Vi tribe in relation to their environment is continued with the Mangkwan tribe, even as their volcanic domain and refusal of Eywa have perverted this cultural trend. The Mangkwan’s predisposition for wearing bones makes them look threatening, but also as if their outfits are masochistically constricting them. Varang’s headpieces are a great statement unto themselves, witchy and threatening like Dilophosaurus fins. It’s the ultimate mix of business and pleasure. On the opposite end of both spectrums, I’m fascinated by Neytiri’s mourning veil, which stands out against her lack of accessorizing or flowing garments. 

If nothing else, this nomination makes me further appreciate Scott’s consistent worldbuilding skill across this series. I’ve never been the hugest Avatar fan, but the past two entries have certainly given her new room to explore how these long blue humanoids would connect themselves to nature. As with Carter and Hawley, Scott gets a lot of mileage out of dressing her deep well of background characters to the nines. Scott and Cameron clearly have a lot of experience with culturally informative dress amongst hordes of people trying not to die at sea, though it’s a very different achievement when you’re bringing your alien OCs to life. I can’t imagine Avatar is ranked high enough to win this category on all the gambling apps, overtaking every waking moment of our existence, but I’d cheer if it won.

Scott has been sharing the physical work that went into the FIRE AND ASH costumes on her socials.

Cláudio, you’ve talked about Scott posting a lot of behind-the-scenes insights on her Instagram, including a lot of technical know-how behind the creation of these looks and their 3-D modeling. Where do you stand on this nomination and on Martin Supremacy?

CLÁUDIO: It's difficult for me to describe how much I adore Scott's nomination. So much of these films' narratives revolve around spiritual notions of connection to Nature, around sci-fi religion and the cultural schisms within the Na'vi and their attrite relationship with the human colonizers. And so much of those tensions are manifested in the costumes, insubstantial as they may seem for the desinterested eye. The distinctions between the forest, the sea and windfaring tribes is fantastically delineated while maintaining a harmony that doesn't follow into the ash people. I love the knitting, crochet and knot techniques, how the textile manipulation feels real - all of these clothes were manufactured before getting scanner - while also differing from the audience's expectations of what clothing should look like.

Consider the way the Metkayina people tend to don ornaments that echo the reefs, as if their sense of style stemmed from both honoring and communing with the landscape. Or the bursts of colors of the wind folk, the swirling geometry in their clothing, both suggesting a specific cultural identity of their own and the possibility of a melange, formed by their trade with other tribes, some of whom we may haven't yet seen on screen.

Varang is THAT DIVA! She is mother. She is death.

But of course, the Mangkwan are the reason this unexpected nomination came to be. They are striking, from Varang's varying headdresses to their use of quills and spines, a cult of death and destruction crystallized in costume design. Maybe my favorite detail is how painful many of their fashions look. Scott has drawn from a cornucopia of tribal traditions from several indigenous peoples in her research, yet has ensured an alien aesthetic that's not alienating and aims to help the audience transcend exoticism into empathy and appreciation. With the ash warriors, her designs lean on visual discomfort that may still look beautiful but now communicates ideas of physical pain. Varang's bandeaux-esque top looks like a variation on the Catholic Cilice, an irony-laden comparison that still makes perfect sense. In her denial cum fight against divinity, the only thing this psychopath believes is the sacrament of pain.

Marty Supreme's nomination is less exciting but no less deserving. The period reconstruction is impeccable, as are the illustrations of class discrepancies between characters, the cultural specificities that separate and/or connect each of them, and the help they provide in conveying the post-war mural of Josh Safdie's latest character study. Miyako Bellizi does a wonderful job remembering that an immersion into the realities of this historical episode shouldn't look like a fashion catalogue, people dressing according to different personal timelines that reflect their circumstances, not unlike what Carter does for Sinners.

Furthermore, there's a great amount of play with proportion and bodies, weaponizing Chalamet's slightness in slouchy suits, the cartoonish distortion of his thick glasses, and the precision and cutting of Endo's look. I really appreciate the way Paltrow's Hollywood star is always swaddling herself in wraps or shawl collars, loneliness embodied in a sartorial pursuit of gilded comforts. Maybe I'm projecting meaning into her wardrobe because I love that performance so much. You tell me.

Some of the best costumes in MARTY SUPREME can be found on the extras.

NICK: It's really strong stuff. Bellizi has been Safdie's costume designer since Good Time, and she's excellent at finding sharp, distinct designs for the slimiest men you've ever seen. All of their protagonists could be plopped into GTA or a graphic novel with no fuss. In conspiracy with Jack Fisk's impeccable sets, she has to hold down Marty Supreme's period authenticity while the music and performance styles exist generations apart from its postwar America milieu. 

It’s excellent stuff, even if this nomination feels more emblematic of Best Picture heat. I’m with you on digging Paltrow’s whole wardrobe, in no small part because she’s dressed like a heterosexual Carol Aird. Just as lonely, just as shrewd, just as elegant, but with less appetizing company on all sides. Her gray suit when she first goes to the ping pong tournament reminded me so much of the outfit Carol wears when she takes Therese to lunch for the first time. The proportionizing on Timmy is a hoot, and I like how his look and his performance are working to be genuinely unappealing rather than secretly charming. He’s not scrappy, he’s a jackass who’s punching about his weight class and going out in clothes that look good as proof they look good *on him*. The various mobsters and businessmen Marty encounters (not that there’s much difference when you get down to it) look natty and elegant in a way his suits aspire to.

All in all, a very strong category, if not a wildly adventurous one. Sinners would be my personal preference, with Frankenstein right behind it, and I expect they’ll be neck and neck for the Oscar. But now it’s time for our favorite part: who would we have picked for this award? You first, hun. Just make sure to leave a few films for me! 

CLÁUDIO: Sorry to its fans, but Wicked: For Good isn't one of the films I'd have liked to see here, even though it was this category's big snub as far as pundits are concerned.

HEDDA proposes a story told in three dresses.

Instead, let me wax poetic about the midcentury glamour Lindsay Pugh designed for Hedda, including Tessa Thompson's green bruise of a dress and Nina Hoss's bosom-forward fit. Colleen Atwood's work on both Kiss of the Spider Woman and One Battle After Another was a return to form after many years slipping into a parody of herself by Tim Burton's side. I was especially taken with the excellence of her ensembles for the PTA Oscar favorite. It's not just the instantly iconic costume in which DiCaprio spends most of the film, but also Sean Penn's comically tight shirts, the contrast of soft and hard in Chase Infiniti's prom regalia turned fugitive attire. Then again, even when the Costume Branch opens itself to celebrating a predominantly CGI wardrobe, contemporary fashion is still a step too far. 

So, let me leave potential shout-outs to other period films like The Secret Agent or Kokuho, Peter Hujar's Day or Sound of Falling, to you, and I'll focus on highlighting modern-day narratives. Because they deserve love. Because, though its incursions into Regency masquerade are eye-catching, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life still reaches its sartorial peaks with the more modest everyday clothes, the color stories devised by Flore Vauville. Because weaponized excentricity came back in style thanks to Weapons and Bring Her Back, with designers Trish Summerville and Anna Cahill reiventing the look of hagsploitation. Same goes for Jenny Eagen's work in Wake Up Dead Man, where Glenn Close got to do some Mrs. Danvers cosplay while rewearing her father's own crucifix, previously seen in House of the Spirits. 

It's not all about old biddies slaying, of course. Sometimes, it's a desperate paper mill manager doing the slayage, testing the comedic possibilities of a fitted suit, and doing some eyebrow-raising cultural appropriation in his free time. Cho Sang-kyung's work in No Other Choice is sublime stuff, honing in on discomfort as the main tenet of her designs. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl also has fun with death, looking at the rituals of mourning and the potential absurdities that come with it. Nothing beats the visual comedy achieved by Estelle Don Banda's costumes in that unforgettable opening sequence. Speaking of death, Kurt and Bart deserve some love for the ominous figure that gives The Woman in the Yard its name. 

Finally, sometimes good costume design is about presenting something the audience can covet, playing with desiring images, and the lust that can spring from the right ensemble on the right wearer. I'm thinking of Ellen Mirojnick's styling of Black Bag's beautiful cast, choosing pieces that almost beckon our touch and inspire musings about how the silkiness of Cate Blanchett's dinner dress slides across her back or the wool embrace of Michael Fassbender's perfectly tailored suits. And don't forget about Pillion, the way Grace Snell lets us peek into the BDSM subculture in a way that can summon mirth but never scorn or disgust, lulling us into sharing Colin's lustful gaze toward Ray and the journey of his own self-discovery. Those biker leathers are a masterpiece!

NICK: I ask you to leave a few films for me, and then you go on to list a dozen titles you loved, one you did not, and throw out four names for me to explore if I so chose to. Goddamn, bitch. But against all odds, you did leave me some films to shout out!

THE UGLY STEPSISTER flips the script on Cinderella, her iconography.

To continue the contemporary costuming trend, I really enjoyed the wardrobes Kairo Courts put together for Keke Palmer and SZA in One Of Them Days, which are so eccentric and personality-revealing even when they’re wearing borrowed fits or hand-me-down fits. Great dissonances and alignments, and the second-tier players are better supported by the clothes and makeup teams than by the patchy script. In the lands before time, I’m a huge fan of Silvia Grabowski’s costumes for Grand Tour. The clothes are as crisp and radiant as any Golden-age movie star’s ever were, speaking equally to Gomes’ twin interest in meticulous period detailing and cinematic fantasy. This is basically the inversion of what Manon Rasmussen does for The Ugly Stepsister, concocting a wild blend of regional- and era-specific fashion trends into a fever of fairytale extravagance. Extra points for the nose-reshaper headpiece Elvira wears. Praising a Wes Anderson movie for its costumes is practically de rigueur, but he and Milenan Canonero once again create a detailed set of looks to flesh out its characters and their bizarre little worlds. 

Also, some picks for the gays: Go check out Latin Blood: The Ballad of Ney Matogrosso, which vividly portrays Brazil’s punk, queer Bohemia of the 1970s and 80s. The performance costumes are a joy, and the daywear of these homosexuals is ridiculously sexy. Never has a Speedo fought for its life like the Speedos these men wear, barely covering the base of their dicks, just as the lord intended. Queens of Drama is a whole host of messy pop music insanity, blurring any line between authenticity and plastic “selling out” under a sea of garish colors and cuts. And yes, by the way, I really did enjoy the costumes for Peter Hujar’s Day, which are fun in and of themselves but used pretty ingeniously to destabilize our sense of time and reality in what could have been a hermetic experiment.

Other faves include the New Wave chicness of Nouvelle Vague, the menacing and vulnerable costumes (on and off the set) of The Ice Tower, Die My Love’s small town patterns and edge-of-madness denim overalls, and the raver’s unified aim for desert-ready comforts that still read as character-specific fits in Sirât. I’m sad I didn’t see Kokuho or Queens of the Dead before this volley, but I’d love to hear what our human commenters would shout out in the comments.

In FRANKENSTEIN, mother is a blood stain, father is a looming shadow. Oscar worthy?

I’m ultimately predicting Frankenstein for this award, with Sinners very close on its heels. Ask me again on another day, and I’ll switch those names. Last but not least, thank you for a wonderful conversation about this year’s Best Costume Design nominees. It’s always wonderful to do these volleys with you. We should talk again soon, it’s been far too long since we did a piece together.

CLÁUDIO: It's not against all odds. You've been sharing your personal ballots and deliberations with me all year long. I knew some of the titles to leave for you. I AM VERY CONSIDERATE! Also, look at you calling out our bot commenters that have to be regularly moderated out of posts. Hi guys, we don't love you, but hi just the same.

Anyway, I'm also predicting Frankenstein, but a Sinners' win wouldn't surprise me. The sheer love for Hamnet could propel it to an unlikely victory, while Marty Supreme and Avatar are just happy to be here. In terms of preference, I'd go Sinners, then Frankie, Fire and Ash, Twink Supreme, and Hamnet in last place. For all that his category surprised in Oscar nomination morning thanks to Scott's inclusion, I fear the final results won't shock us.

Thank you for a wonderful conversation. It had been almost twelve hours since we last spoke about movies, a terrible draught in communication. And now, back to the RuCap we're writing concurrently. Damn, Varang would be a menace on Drag Race, cunty fashion and all.

They're dressed to kill. Look out!

Previous Oscar Volleys: 

• BEST CASTING, with Nathaniel R and Abe Friedtanzer

Comments

[Flowers By Irene]

As for casting I have to say Marty even here. But I would love a third for Ruth E. Carter.
Frankenstein costumes are not good, they are showy.