So here’s where my hackles raise a bit, and I step on some toes.
I don’t care about the cool-kid Oscars. The acting, directing, and picture awards don’t really excite me. I’ve got my own secret version of the Big Five, and this category is one of them. My Big Five favorite Academy Awards are for Art Direction, Cinematography, Costumes, Editing, and Special Effects. This is tripled for years like 2006, where there really aren’t any nasty little-boy action films clogging up the works—shove off, Peter Jackson for selling out with Heavenly Creatures and everything you’ve done since then, and dulled George Lucas, and inane car-chases! There is beauty in the movies! (And, for the record, car chases rock.)
And writing. Obviously screenplay awards count. More…
Here’s another confession: I’m sort of shocked that The Fountain went categorically unnominated.
This is a very difficult and very easy one. It’s really down to only two movies, and I’ve seen both of them: Pan’s Labyrinth and Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest. And I think that Pirates may have been mis-nominated. That is to say, Pirates is about special effects.
Here’s what this category boils down to for me: cinematic art direction should represent to what extent the movie’s world engulfs the viewer, a measure of how difficult the aesthetic is to escape from, how effortless to drown in. In Pan’s Labyrinth, the most memorable character was the environment in which the human actors and CGI or costumed characters dwelt; the visual persona of the film WAS the movie, was the star of the movie. The star of Dead Man’s Chest was Johnny Depp.
Sorry to the rest of you 20th-century costume dramas, you don’t stand a chance against the Froudian dystopia of Franco’s Spain.
