Oscar Categories That Done Got the Boot: A Retrospective
The 94th Academy Awards are pre-taping several technical categories—Best Editing, Production Design, Score, Sound, and Makeup/Hairstyling—rather than showing them during the live telecast. The Academy is Moneyballing the telecast for ratings and assuming the audience doesn’t care about some of the more boring Arts and Sciences of Motion Pictures. After all, editing a movie is not sexy. What’s sexy is an Oscar for “Best Cheer Moment” and a live performance of “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” a very catchy song that is not actually nominated for any awards.
It’s ultimately not worth getting mad. The Oscars is a TV entertainment show where people congratulate themselves, and it just wants to be more viewer-friendly. I will admit that I’m a drooling slug who’s less invested in watching acceptance speeches from unknown technical auteurs who are not very cool movie stars or directors that I can identify by name. Maybe the telecast will be effective at “interweaving” the earlier-taped awards so that we get the best of both worlds: the satisfaction of seeing a movie win, but without the burden (UGH!!!) of having to watch a speech by some uggo.
Is this or is this not a Big Travesty – I don’t know. But the technical nuances of moviemaking deserve to be celebrated alongside any other achievement, especially where the main reason that many movies are so memorable is because of the underlying technical work. Now might be a good time to look back at some examples of winners throughout the history of our favorite silly awards show that show us why these categories are kind of cool.
Best Editing
Robert Bresson said that a movie is made three times: when it is written, when it is shot, and when it is edited. But the people who edit movies are nerds and editing = YAWN, so this is being relegated to the award minor leagues. (It is so funny that they’re doing this. They should also give the non-televised awards at a different location, perhaps somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, and ask people not to dress nicely. Go all the way, make it a bit.)
Best Editing has been awarded since 1934 and famously correlates to Best Picture about two thirds of the time, making it especially interesting when a movie’s editing is awarded on its own and without any real shot at Best Picture. Think of the genre car-chase thriller Bullitt (1968) or the foreign-language political thriller Z (1969). Two of Steven Spielberg’s most lauded masterpieces–Jaws (1975) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)–failed to win Best Picture but won in the editing category. Two consecutive David Fincher films–The Social Network (2009) and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2010)–did the same. And Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) was recognized bring an editing clinic despite Silence of the Lambs taking Best Picture and most of the other big awards.
The best example of an editing winner that didn’t have a ton of other awards success is Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979), where Roy Scheider is a broadway choreographer with self-absorbed, struggling-artist tendencies worthy of 8 ½’s Guido Anselmi. It moves seamlessly in and out of dream sequences and cleverly uses a morning-routine motif that would be at home in the opening credits of any modern-day prestige TV show. Anytime dancing is shown on screen, All That Jazz stands against anything ever filmed, and I wish I had more YouTube clips to prove it. Imagine a sequence in the opening scene where dancers spin and morph into one another – that’s editing. And in a dead play to the Oscar voters, the main character even has a side hustle editing a damn film. All That Jazz beat Apocalypse Now in editing, and I think it deserved to.
Honorable Mention: check out John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix, which beat out war drama The Sand Pebbles and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for Best Editing in 1966. It stars James Garner as a Formula One driver with seamlessly integrated, real-life F1 race footage from Monaco, Spa, and other venues. You can draw a straight line between this movie and the chase sequences in Frankenheimer’s Ronin (1998), as well as the editing techniques still used in present-day racing docudramas like Netflix’s Drive to Survive.
All That Jazz is not “officially” available on any streaming service, and I fully encourage you to purchase the Blu-Ray from the Criterion Collection. But, also, YouTube exists, and sometimes, maybe, there are gaps between an entire movie being uploaded and a studio initiating a takedown request. Who’s to say? Grand Prix is currently streaming on Hulu with a Live TV subscription.
Best Production Design
Best Production Design is also an award getting yanked off stage by a gigantic, cartoon stage-prop shepherd’s hook. YOINK, not cool enough. Macbeth’s oppressingly minimalist, Bauhaus-on-steroids backdrop and West Side Story’s practical Lincoln Square sets are not cool. And that house from The Power of the Dog (my goodness) is not gonna sell those ads.
I must put on my atomic kvetching hat for a minute and point out that, while there is no live award for production design this year, we will have to see Best Visual Effects. This is, of course, the easiest, dirtiest, most absolutely pandering way to make sure that we (the babies who watch the Oscars!) can see an award given to the movies that have (1) already made billions of dollars, (2) already dominate the pop culture discourse, and (3) have mostly abandoned the concept of art direction altogether. (Check out some of the behind-the-scenes features for Spider Man: No Way Home to see what art direction is now. It’s a door in the middle of a blue screen. Bleak stuff!) Other than Dune, where I think the production design and CGI actually complement one another–a rare modern feat, there is no overlap among this year’s nominees for VFX and Production Design.
Before the rise of the computers, this category was rich with examples of how production design can elevate a movie to masterpiece status. From 1940-1966, art directors of both a color and a black-and-white film were awarded, making for some fun one-two punches. In 1948, Hamlet (the one with Laurence Olivier) won in B&W The Red Shoes won in color. In 1951, A Streetcar Named Desire and An American in Paris won in their respective categories. In 1961, it was The Hustler West Side Story.
A Room With a View (1985) is a recent-ish winner that exemplifies the heights that strong production design can drag an otherwise staid adaptation kicking and screaming. It was the first widely known Merchant-Ivory film and flexed art direction acumen repeated later in Howard’s End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993), set against turn-of-the century Florentine hotel rooms, no-business-being-so-opulent mirrors, and pianos with candles on them. Without the constant indulgence of painterly interiors and period-honoring exteriors, this might be a much worse movie, Daniel Day Lewis’s hilarious portrayal of Cecil notwithstanding.
I also have to mention Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), if nothing other than an example of how calculating production design can still be central to the entire existence of a movie. There is no OUATIH without the transformative work by Barbara Ling and Nancy Haigh in recreating 1969 Los Angeles and building specific, practical, and evocative backdrops.
A Room With a View is streaming on The Criterion Channel in a sparkling 35mm-to-4K transfer, or HBOMax in noticeably worse quality. OUATIH is streaming on HBOMax.
Best Score
Another award we won’t see given live is Best Score – an extremely uncool category whose lunch money has been stolen before it was given a wedgie and stuffed into a locker.
Prior to being picked last in award show dodgeball, Best Score frequently included multiple winners per year. In the late 1930’s, the Academy awarded both original score compositions and “scoring,” i.e. using pre-existing music. Example: The Wizard of Oz won for original score in 1939 while Stagecoach won for “scoring” with its use of Stephen Foster and other American folk songs. (A modern version of this split might award both original scores and music supervisors who select music for soundtracks, and let me tell you, I would be fully in favor of it.) The Academy also previously recognized scores in both Musical and Dramatic/Comedy categories, which led to some fun pairings like Sunset Boulevard and Annie Get Your Gun in 1950 and Lawrence of Arabia and The Music Man in 1962.
A favorite former Oscars practice was finding ways to recognize compositions used in movies but not composed for movies. The name of the award kept changing, but as best I can tell, was consistent in that it applied to a series of songs or adaptations thereof all either composed or arranged by one artist. Winners included The Beatles for Let It Be (1969) (recognizing the previously recorded pop songs) and John Williams for Fiddler on the Roof (1970) (recognizing his adaptation of the stage score).
The best example is Leonard Rosenman’s win for his arrangements of prior music on Barry Lyndon (1975). The name of the award this year was “Scoring: Original Song Score and Adaptation or Scoring: Adaptation” (it doesn’t roll off the tongue). The recurrence of George Handel’s “Sarabande” throughout Barry Lyndon (full force in the opening credits vs. a more pensive, building version during the pivotal duel scene) is hauntingly effective, as is Rosenman’s arrangement of Franz Schubert’s “Piano Trio No. 2 in E Flat” during the introduction of Marisa Berenson’s character. Somehow, Schubert is the exactly correct music over which a narrator should say phrases like “riddled with gout and a myriad of diseases” and “a melancholy little boy.”
I’m glad there was an award to recognize Rosenman’s work in 1975, because there isn’t now. The “Scoring/Adaptation” Oscar was discontinued after Prince’s win for Purple Rain (1984), and the rules underwent several fluctuations over the next decade in direct response to a spate of Disney wins for movies like The Little Mermaid (1989) and Aladdin (1992). To box Disney in, we briefly saw the return of the split award for Drama/Comedy Score vs. Musical, but it became quite tortured right away: The Fully Monty won in 1997 in the “Musical or Comedy” category alongside Titanic in “Dramatic.”
Since 2000, we’ve been back down to just one award for all movie categories, but not without some minor controversies over what counts as a fully original score. Johnny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood score was famously ineligible in 2007 because of some limited use of non-original compositions. But The Social Network won two years later, even though Trent Reznor and Attic Ross’s “Magnetic” (played in this scene) is basically Track 14 from the Ghost II album released under Nine Inch Nails.
An Honorable Mention for a favorite winner in this category is Chariots of Fire (1981). We all know this scene, but Vangelis’s largely electronic score set against the backdrop of British athletes in the 1920’s (who love them some Gilbert and Sullivan almost as much as Sideshow Bob does) is somehow both alien and contemporary at the same time. I can’t explain why a Yamaha CS-80 is the right choice to play over this scene of a runner falling down and getting back up to still win a race – it just is.
Barry Lyndon is currently streaming for free on Kanopy with your library card. Chariots of Fire is on HBOMax. The Social Network is on Netflix.
Best Sound
Of all the technical categories that got sent to the awards kiddie table so that the adult awards can swear and eat in peace, Best Sound was probably the least surprising, because the Academy and the voters have always had a tough time figuring out who and what they are actually recognizing. It’s been split into two awards at various times in history: “Best Sound” vs. “Best Sound Effects” (e.g., My Fair Lady and Goldfinger, respectively, in 1964, and Grand Prix taking both categories in 1966), “Sound” vs. “Sound Effects Editing” (e.g., Platoon and Aliens, respectively, in 1986; Speed winning both in 1994), and most recently, “Sound Mixing” and “Sound Editing” (e.g., Slumdog Millionaire winning in Mixing and The Dark Knight winning in Editing in 2008). And in 2020, the Academy again threw its hands up and now, once again, awards just one overall “Sound” category.
The best examples of winners in this umbrella of categories are ones where the memory of the film is inextricably linked to specific noises. Who Framed Roger Rabbit won “Best Sound Effects Editing” in 1988 and might have the most extensive and insane array of Foley effects in any film ever made. I am almost 40 years old, and I can’t look at a pair of household dishwashing gloves without thinking of Judge Doom’s execution-by-dip and the stretchy sound made by those black rubber gloves. The winner in the same category two years later was The Hunt For Red October, which features sounds of acoustic homing torpedos that will also live in my head until I die. 2003’s winner in Editing features another naval warfare noise fest in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, replete with cannonballs, swords, people yelling anachronistic things like “huzzah,” and little whistles—truly a fun time at the movies. The honorable mention here goes to From Here to Eternity (1953 – a year with just one overall Sound category). It’s the only movie I can think of that includes both incredibly effective, scary air raid noises and impromptu bugling.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is streaming on Disney+ (allegedly thanks to Spielberg’s appreciation of Disney giving West Side Story a holiday and Oscar-adjacent premier date!) Master and Commander is on HBOMax. The Hunt For Red October and From Here to Eternity are both available to rent or buy on VOD platforms, and your dad probably has VHS copies of both of them.
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
The last technical category that got moved to the bottom shelf at the grocery store with the Malt-O-Meal awards is Best Makeup and Hairstyling. It has only been regularly awarded since 1981, and even compared to score composers, tends to see a smaller cadre of regulars. Rick Baker has been nominated 11 times and won 7, for movies like Harry and the Hendersons (1987), The Nutty Professor (1996), and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000); while Greg Cannom has 10 nominations and 4 wins (including Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)).
Like production design, makeup is a purely practical art that is being driven to extinction by VFX and is responsible for a lot of childhood memories. And it’s a fun Oscar category because it rewards movies that might otherwise not garner much Academy attention. Beetlejuice won in 1988 (over Rick Baker’s work on Coming to America!). Not only is Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice look iconic, but there several other makeup sequences that would 100% be done via CGI now, including this one where Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin are comically aged.
The best somehow-now-under-the-radar winner in this category is Dick Tracy (1990), where the villains all have wildly exaggerated, prosthetic features but the main character played by Warren Beatty is wearing no makeup at all. Al Pacino received an acting nomination (much more deservedly than when he actually won for Scent of a Woman in 1993) for playing Big Boy Caprice–a character invented purely for the movie–underneath a prosthetic nose and chin that he helped design himself. And I cringe at the overuse of the adjective “Lynchian,” but Madonna as “the Blank” … well, it’s at least closer to an appropriate use of the term than usual.
Beetlejuice and Dick Tracy are both available to rent or buy on VOD platforms.
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