More Guild Honors: Make-Up, Sound, and Adapted Scripts

Three sets of awards were handed out yesterday so let's talk MUAHS (Makeup and Hair Stylists), CAS (Cinema Audio Society) and USC Scripters.

USC Scripter
This Adapted Screenplay prize (not a guild prize) is from the University of Southern California but it's built itself up as quite a tradition in awards season. This is its 28th year! The prize goes to both the original source material author and the Screenwriter adapting it. Their winner usually wins the Oscar and they chose (no surprise) The Big Short originally a non-fiction book by Michael Lewis (all three the movies based on his books have been nominated for Best Picture) and adapted by Charles Randolph & Adam McKay. 

ICYMI: Manuel's fun ranking of the most quotable Screenplay nominees

Cinema Audio Society
The Revenant took this prize beating Mad Max, Bridge of Spies, Star Wars, and The Hateful Eight. It's up against the first three again on Oscar night plus The Martian. 

Makeup Artists and Hair Stylists Guild
Period Makeup: Mad Max Fury Road
Period Hair: Cinderella 
Special Makeup Effects: Mad Max Fury Road
Contemporary Makeup: Furious 7
Contemporary Hairstyling: Pitch Perfect 2

Carol keeps losing prizes (sigh). Anyway, solid choices though one can quibble. I never took in Furious 7 so that one is a bit of a headscratcher sight unseen... especially with Sicario in the running. It's also a bit perplexing to think of Pitch Perfect 2's hair work topping Spy's funny and elaborate quick changes (which I favoried in my own awardage) or Ex Machina's sleek style. You can see the complete MUAHS awards here (American Horror Story: Hotel, Game of Thrones and Dancing with the Stars were big in their TV categories).

Do you think Fury Road, The Revenant, and The Big Short will repeat these wins at the Oscars?

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.

First Look at Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Kieran, here. The three films nominated for Best Makeup and Hairstyling at the Oscars this are an interesting bunch.  The Academy had a lot of options to choose from and it almost feels miraculous that they didn’t default nominate things like The Danish Girl or Black Mass, which (questions of merit aside) are practically begging the viewer to notice the makeup work in both cases.  Even if they’re not yours, it’s a respectable crop of nominees. An aside: if we’re going to get five original song nominees every year no matter what, why only three nominees in this category? Curious…

 Mad Max: Fury Road – Lesley Vanderwalt, Elka Wardega, Damian Martin

Previous Work: A lot of features with both George Miller and Baz Luhrmann, but as supervisors (makeup supervisors don’t get nominated, so they weren’t cited when Moulin Rouge! was nominated in 2001)

How They Got Nominated: It almost feels like a silly thing to ponder when looking at the rich tapestry of character designs populating Mad Max: Fury Road. In a way, it could have all felt very random and directionless, but manages to feel cohesive in an “organized chaos” kind of way. It all feels of a piece, even if the makeup work varies greatly from character-to-character. Lesley Vanderwalt has stated that Miss Giddy was the character who took the longest to create, with her intricate, other-worldly body etchings.

 The 100-Year-Old-Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared – Love Larson, Eva Von Bahr

Previous Work: Many Swedish films, though they did work on David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (not the original Swedish language version, oddly enough).

How They Got Nominated: Our Alone, Yet Not Alone nominee of 2015 in that “Who? For what?” kind of way. Few were predicting this to get in, though we probably should have been.  Old age makeup is to the makeup branch what gunfire is to the sound branch—its mere presence in a film automatically makes it a contender. Not to say that there’s undeserving makeup work at play in The 100 Year-Old-Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (it’s on Amazon for anyone who wants to check it out). The old age makeup here is…about as good as old age makeup should look in a major motion picture. It’s not wholly convincing in terms of believability, nor is it Benjamin Button-level absurd in how over-the-top it is. And (just in case you were wondering) this film has not replaced Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? as the longest title of an Academy Award-nominated film.

 The Revenant – Siân Grigg, Duncan Jarman, Robert A. Pandini

Previous Work: Siân Grigg is basically Leonardo DiCaprio’s J. Roy Helland. He’s been his makeup artist on every film since Titanic. If the campaign is not playing up this angle already, they really should be. And here's hoping Leo thanks him in his speech.

How They Got Nominated: The Academy clearly liked The Revenant a whole lot. But, even setting aside the films massive nomination tally, there is good makeup work going on here. In fact, of all The Revenant’s 37 nominations, this is the one it arguably deserves the most (sorry, Leo). The team is in it to win it, too. They’re already making the rounds about how Leo sat in hair and makeup for an exhausting five hours each day to apply the wounds and gashes, which do look pretty impressive.

 What’s your pick to win among these nominees? What missed out on a nomination that was deserving?

Curio: Bowie Forever

Pt 1 Goodbye to Bowie via Velvet Goldmine
Pt 2 Goodbye to Bowie....and Curio, for now

Alexa here, still reeling over the loss of David Bowie. It really took the steam out of me today, as I'm sure it did a lot of you.  He was such a touchstone that it felt as if he would never die. But he lives on as inspiration.

And so too might Curio. I hope it does. If not in this exact form. This weekly arts & crafts series, which Nathaniel invited me to do years ago, has had a long run at TFE but I must move on for 2016. (Parenthood really alters the life of a cinephile.)

But back to Bowie. I've been enjoying seeing some of this inspiration filtered through the minds of others, so here are a few some beautiful and fun curios -- everything from a career spanning animated gif, to realistic dolls, and more traditional fan art.

Celebrate the icon with wide eyes after the jump... 

 

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You Need Serious Hair!

Kyle back in the house to address a very serious topic: Hair. Caution: Joy hairdo spoilers ahead.

The extent to which certain moments of David O. Russell’s Joy are deliberately soap opera-y is an open question. The movie’s latter scenes, in particular, draw on clichéd images of toughness: pleather jacket, sunglasses, and, of course, newly shorned hair. It seems that nothing says a woman is serious quite like taking matters, i.e., her hair, into her own hands.

I’ll happily debate the merits of having a narrative arc reveal a woman to be a badass—since most already are in my book—but I’d rather hear what some of your favorite DIY hair-cutting scenes are. Here are three of the most dramatic that leap to my mind after the jump...

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