Personal Ballots Continued: Editing, Makeup, Visual FX

I promised daily Film Bitch Award nominations and I aim to deliver since we were supposed to technically be done by now. The best laid plans. Yesterday I shared male acting choices and jazzed up two Oscar charts. Today half of the visual categories have gone up and I've updated the correlative three Oscar charts, too.

FILM EDITING
I'm so disappointed that Academy voters skipped Sicario's Joe Walker in this category so I've rectified that obvious error. Talk about sustaining the tension masterfully for two hours. He's best known for his work with director Steve McQueen and was Oscar-nominated a couple of years ago for 12 Years a Slave. He had a good year since he also edited Blackhat which people found lacking in the emotion and story department but which was quite fine on a craft level. Two editors we interviewed here Nathan Nugent (Room) and Affonso Gonçalves (Carol) are also honored. 

VISUAL FX
Look I get that people didn't love The Avengers: Age of Ultron but passing on its visual effects strikes me as pettiness for feeling disappointed and getting Marvel fatigue. This is state of the art superheroics. Looking over my nominees now I'm realizing it was a very good year for robots: Ultron, The Vision, Ex Machina's Ava, and even Tomorrowland's Athena 

MAKEUP & HAIR
I mostly adhere to Oscar rules with my traditional categories but not here as I am adamantly opposed to this category being ghettoized the way it is with the Academy. The makeup artists are the ONLY artists with an oscar category that are allowed only 3 nominations. Everyone else gets 5 and that is just messed up since every single film uses a hair and makeup team. With five spots, I have room for both of the high profile Oscar nominees because who can forget Leo's horrific zombie face in The Revenant or smoky eyes reaching their gonzo apotheosis in Mad Max Fury Road. For the other spots I've embraced maximum beauty (Carol), stylish comedy (Spy), and the world's most famous detective (Mr Holmes). Read the writeups here.

*If any makeup artists are reading I'd love a better education on how these departments work on film sets. It's one of the behind the scenes jobs where credits dont feel very consistent from film to film in terms of titles of the players.

Interview: Affonso Gonçalves and the Art of Editing Great Actresses

Affonso Gonçalves with this ACE win for editing True Detective (2014)Affonso Gonçalves is a man that every actress lover ought to both thank and envy. Over the course of his career in TV and film he has been privvy to a consisently vivid series of strong and sometimes downright iconic performances by several of our greatest actress. He's helped shape the way we see them, too.

His career began in earnest with as an assisant editor on Todd Solondz's cult hit about a nerdy teenager Dawn Weiner in Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and soon thereafter he was editing multiple films for Ira Sachs and other independent minded directors. In the 20 years since his debut he's edited performances by Tilda Swinton (Only Lovers Left Alive), Kate Winslet (Mildred Pierce), Kerry Washington (Night Catches Us), Michelle Williams (The Hawk is Dying), Kim Basinger (The Door in the Floor), and  Patricia Clarkson (Married Life). More famously he's edited two star-making young performances that went on to be Oscar nominated for Best Actress in Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone (2010) and Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). Next week he'll likely be able to add two more Oscar nominated performances to his editing triumphs with Cate Blanchett & Rooney Mara's duet in Carol.

I had the pleasure recently of grilling him about watching and shaping these Best Actress performances in Winter's Bone, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Carol. Here's our conversation (edited for length and clarity) with very mild Carol spoilers if you haven't yet seen it. The film opens in additional theaters this weekend. More after the jump...

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Interview: Nathan Nugent on Cutting those Beautiful Performances in "Room"

Nathan Nugent won an Irish Film & Television Academy statue for his first collaboration with Lenny Abrahamson. "Room" is their third film together.Editing is often referred to as "cutting," arguably a holdover word from the days where film edictors actually had to slice frames apart and then tape them back together. But cutting, figuratively, remains one their undeniable jobs, pruning away at hours and hour of footage for a given movie. It's a puzzle and a discovery as they work at assembling a single identity for a movie that has so many different identities in its unfinished form. Though the days of film editors hunched over their moviolas is over, the job's creative challenge is the same when hunched over the computer.

Moviegoers are probably quickest to note film editing in the action genre, where the speed of cutting tends to make the "invisible art" ever so slightly more visible. But it's a complicated art regardless of genre to create cohesive and rhythmic visual and narrative and performative throughlines with a series of spliced together images and multiple takes.

So we were excited to sit down with rising film editor Nathan Nugent, who has been making a name for himself in films that you might safely call 'actor's pictures.' Room is Nugent's third consecutive film with Lenny Abrahamson who he met through a film producer with whom Abrahamson went to college. As with the birth of many classic collaborations in any industry it was a matter of networking, opportunity and good timing. Or as Nathan humorously puts it.

"He had said to Lenny, 'Oh, you know, you should try Nathan. And I was available and very cheap.'"

What Richard Did (2012), Frank (2014), and Room (2015) followed in close succession. 

NATHANIEL: You've been working with Lenny Abrahamson a lot but you didn't start out in dramas. You started in documentaries. 

NATHAN NUGENT: My wish in film school was always to work in drama. But looking back, I’m glad of that -- that I took that documentary route --  because it certainly had an effect on how I see footage.

NATHANIEL: In what sense?

Nugent's answer and more on Room's beautiful acting after the jump...

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ACE Noms Ignore Spotlight, Love Joy. What is Happening?

The ACE Eddie Nominations are out and as usual there are some real head-scratchers. The guild nominations that precede Oscar noms tend to throw something or other for a loop in terms of perceptions of what the industry loves. Or perhaps it's less complicated than we always assume and it's merely that those who vote on awards just don't see that many movies. Guild types are often more busy making movies than watching them after all.

One head scratcher: I'm not sure how we've ended up in a world where Joy, David O. Russell's latest ode to Jennifer Lawrence, is nominated for its editing. I don't mean to pick on the picture as I actually think it's far better than its reviews imply and am happy to have company with Nick and Jose on this; it seems fairly obvious that the nation's film critics are working through their David O. Russell issues now that he's made a woman's picture. But for all of Joy's underdiscussed strengths the editing is not one of them. This is no mark against any of its four editors who've done great work in the past but it's fairly obvious that they're struggling with a film that is so multi-toned and multi-authored and possibly unfinished and trying to make the most of its competing impulses and weird detours. The picture struggles to find its rhythm throughout. 

But let's not pick on Joy because people have been way too mean to it. The nominees and more thoughts are after the jump. 

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Can "Creed" Go 12 Rounds With Oscar?

In the past 48 hours I've screened The Revenant, Joy, and Creed. Since the first two are still under embargo we're not allowed to speak of them yet. I will say these non spoilers that The Revenant continues the tradition of Inaritu's love of miserable arguably suicidal men, and Joy continues in the tradition of David O. Russell sandbox like playgrounds for actors eager to play with their new parts. But...embargo!

As movie buffs well know, the original Rocky was a smash hit when it premiered in December 1976, becoming the biggest box office hit of that year, making a star of Sly Stallone, charting a #1 single ("Gonna Fly Now"), and earning an incredible 10 Oscar nominations. It eventually won Picture, Director, and Editing on the big night. And against unreal competition too: Network, Taxi Driver, Bound for Glory, and All The President's Men. The Rocky series spawned a few popular sequels but eventually exhausted its welcome as film franchises do. Creed, smartly plays like both a straight sequel (VII) and a spinoff or rebirth with Rocky Balboa passing the franchise torch to Apollo Creed's son Adonis (Michael B Jordan).

So let's talk Creed and Oscar and the ways it could well factor into the Oscar race after the jump...

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