Technical Awards

This year's nominees for Best Editing are Black Swan, The Fighter, The King's Speech, 127 Hours, and The Social Network.  (How is Inception not on that list?)  As always, voters in this category have a choice between awarding solid storytelling or flashy, stylized editing.  The one that stands out to me is 127 Hours, where the editor had to depict James Franco's character's mindset from multiple sources and build to a frenetic climax.  In fact, discussion of the movie focuses as much on the editing as Franco's performance and those shocking three minutes near the end.

Best Sound Editing is about sound effects and there are five great nominees: Inception, Toy Story 3, Tron: Legacy, True Grit, and Unstoppable.  Unstoppable probably has the most sound effects and Tron: Legacy probably has the most exotic, but I'm going to give my pick to Inception.  Voters always want to give awards to high-quality prestige pictures, but categories like this are dominated by action films.  Giving it to Inception solves both problems.

Best Sound Mixing takes all the sound aspects of a movie into consideration - how the dialogue, effects, music, and foley all work together.  The nominees are Inception, The King's Speech, Salt, The Social Network, and True Grit.  One of my chief complaints about The Social Network was its sound mix, so I'm inclined to count it out.  Again, Inception seems the likely choice. It was a highly technical production with a lot of sound aspects, but it was still a cerebral prestige film.  I think voters will feel good about giving them the win here.

The Best Visual Effects nominees are Alice In Wonderland, Harry Potter 7a, Hereafter, Inception, and Iron Man 2.   Once again, a prestige picture has the edge and Inception will likely be the victor. Its main competition is Hereafter (also a prestige film, but lacking Academy support) and Alice In Wonderland (which was created mostly in computers).  In the end, though, I think that Alice will clean up in the Artistic categories and that Inception will rock the Technical awards.

Technical Awards

Go on, take a guess where most of this hardware is going to go.

Sound Editing and Sound Mixing go hand in hand (except for last year, for some reason) and both categories are nearly identical this year.  Both include Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, and Star Trek.  Up is up for Sound Editing and Transformers 2 is up for Sound Mixing.  These awards usually go to noisy action films or animated movies where all the effects have to be produced or edited in-studio. While there's a chance that The Hurt Locker will take one or both of the sound Oscars, I think that they'll both go to Avatar.  All of Avatar's achievements are technical achievements, and I expect the Academy to recognize that.

Visual effects?  Seriously?  Do I even need to mention that Avatar is up against District 9 and Star Trek?  This one is going straight to the blue monkey-cats.

Editing is a different story.  The nominees are Avatar, The Hurt Locker, District 9, Inglourious Basterds, and Precious.  The Hurt Locker was one of the most suspenseful films of the year, due in no small part to some intense editing.  Best Editing may get caught in an Avatar technical sweep and District 9 may upset, but I think The Hurt Locker is the strongest contender here.

Technical Awards

The safe bet with the two Sound categories is to give them to the same film. Sound engineers do the nominating, but it's mostly actors (who don't necessarily know the difference between the two awards) who do the voting, so they usually pick the same film twice. For the record, "Sound Editing" involves just the effects, while "Sound Mixing" awards the total blend of music, effects, and dialogue. This year, there are four films that overlap in these categories, so we can eliminate Iron Man from Sound Editing and Benjamin Button from Sound Mixing. That leaves The Dark Knight, Slumdog Millionaire, WALL-E, and Wanted.

The other thing to keep in mind here is that while the Academy loves to honor prestige films, this is the place where big loud blockbusters get rewarded. If they have the opportunity to award a big loud blockbuster with prestige and critical acclaim behind it, all the better. That's how The Bourne Ultimatum and The Matrix won their Oscars. This year, the film that fits that bill is The Dark Knight - the highest grossing movie of the year, critically acclaimed, thought-provoking, good acting, and lots of noisy action.

As for Visual Effects, voters usually look for a film where the effects aren't there for their own sake, but are integrated into the storytelling in a meaningful way. In this case, I think that Benjamin Button's more subtle, character-transforming use of computer elements will trump the flashiness of Iron Man and The Dark Knight, which had more traditional action-film effects.

In the Film Editing category, voters have the option of awarding the stolid workmanship and good storytelling of dramas, (Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, and Milk) or flashier high-energy films (Slumdog and The Dark Knight). Guess which ones usually win? While it's possible that The Dark Knight could approach a sweep in the technical categories (like The Matrix did in '99) or that Benjamin Button could pick one up on its road to a sweep, I'm going to pick Slumdog Millionaire. It straddles the best of both worlds: fast-paced action and suspense that expertly cuts between time periods while including dramatic moments with breathtaking transitions. And it has dance numbers. Shiny, happy dance numbers.

Technical Awards

My big prediction for this year's Oscars is that the awards will be distributed categorically - that all the artistic awards will go in one direction and all the technical awards will go in another.

Let's start with Best Editing. Surprisingly, this year's nominees focus mostly on storytelling rather than flash. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Into The Wild, There Will Be Blood, and No Country For Old Men are all pretty standard when it comes to editing. I think it would be interesting for No Country's Roderick Jaynes to win here because he doesn't really exist - he is the pseudonym for directors Joel and Ethan Cohen, who edit their own films. The real standout, though, is The Bourne Ultimatum, a film whose elaborate and jittery editing really contributes to the style, intensity, and suspense of the movie while complimenting the performances, cinematography, and script.

Sound Editing and Sound Mixing are very different things, but often go hand in hand. This year, the nominees are almost identical in both categories. Traditionally, musicals and animated films are praised for their sound. No musicals are nominated this year, but Ratatouille could be a contender. Movies like No Country, There Will Be Blood, and 3:10 To Yuma are nominated for their effective on-location sound rather than their custom sound effects. More likely to win are the big noisy blockbusters like Transformers, however I think the winner in both categories will once again be The Bourne Ultimatum. It really offers the best of both worlds. It's a successful action movie, it was critically praised, and is also a prestige picture - a thinking man's action flick, much like The Matrix, which swept the technical awards back in '99. Count on two more for Bourne.

Three movies are nominated for Visual Effects, which I find very upsetting. I'm only a little surprised that 300 didn't get nominated for costumes and cinematography, but if ever there was a category for a 90% CGI comic-book-based Bronze-Age war movie, it would be Visual Effects. The films the voters did choose are The Golden Compass, Pirates 3, and Transformers. I think The Golden Compass might still be too controversial to win so I'm counting it out. The CGI robots of Transformers would have been a lot more impressive if the cinematography weren't so veritee. I had a hard time focusing on them with all that camera-shaking. Pirates 3 was impressive, but I think voters may have Pirate fatigue - a "been there, done that" attitude about the whole film. Even still, the maelstrom scene was groundbreaking and required new technology to be invented and the seamless blending of makeup and effects is noteworthy. I'll give my pick to Pirates by a small margin.