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…

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An Annual Round of Oscar Trivia Following The Nominations...

by Nathaniel R

Amy Madigan breaking things onscreen and off!

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO CONTRIBUTED TO THIS LIST IN THE COMMENTS. These stats will also probably show up on the Oscar charts too but why not collect them here first or simultaneously while still hopped up on Oscar fever...

RECORDS BROKEN OR SET

• Longest Gap Between Acting Nominations for a Woman
Weapons standout Amy Madigan's 40 year gap between Oscar nominations (her first nomination was in 1985's Twice in a Lifetime) is not an all time record but it is the record for a female actor...

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Eye Candy Predix Pt 2: Will "Wicked" be crowned again in Costume Design?

by Nathaniel R

WICKED FOR GOOD

I cheered when Paul Tazewell won Best Costume Design and Nathan Crowley won Production Design for Wicked and yet I also felt a sense of dread. One of my great popculture fears in this franchise era is that the Oscars will one day lose their identity and become something akin to the Emmys with the same achievements winning again and again. Naturally then I'm excited to see new variations on the pinks and greens and golds and blacks of Wicked's color palette in Wicked For Good but also don't want to see it win back to back Oscars in the eye-candy categories, since it's essentially one long film, split into two. (It's the same reason I rolled my eyes that the Academy felt the need to nominate Stuart Craig and Stepheni McMillan for a full half of the Harry Potter franchise films even though their work was strong).

So what might oppose total Wicked dominance in the eye-candy categories come Oscar time?  Specifically costume design...

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All hail the glorious Ruth E. Carter!

by Cláudio Alves

With her latest victory, costume designer Ruth E. Carter became the first Black woman to win multiple Academy Awards. Breaking barriers and setting Oscar records isn't new to Carter, mind you. In 1992, she became the first African-American nominated in the category, and later was its first Black winner, thanks to 2018's Black Panther. Having won again for the sequel, Wakanda Forever, she's also the only person to earn multiple Costume Design Oscars for the same franchise. Considering she's dedicated so much of her career to the representation of Black history on screen, it feels correct that Carter's name should forever have a place in the history books… 

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Review: "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"

by Nathaniel R

Presenting a task as impossible as hiding a futuristic country for centuries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Imagine having to follow up the phenomenon of Marvel's Black Panther (2018) which, like most explosive zeitgeist events, had ultra precise perfectly timed ingredients and arrived at the exact moment in culture when all of them would be most appreciated. Now imagine having to follow that up without its charismatic leading man, lost to cancer at the young peak of an already impressive career. Director Ryan Coogler was in an unenviable position. It's no surprise, then, that the sequel to Marvel's most popular solo adventure is a bit wobbly on arrival. Never mind that the sequel must bear the weight of all the absurd expectations and make sense of T'Challa's absence while trying to find new legs on both land AND at sea. Thank god for the latter. Whatever the movie's faults, it's not from attempting a simplistic retread...

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