OVP: Best Film Editing (2009)
The Nominees Were...
Stephen Rivkin, John Refoua, and James Cameron, Avatar
Julian Clarke, District 9
Bob Murawski and Chris Innis, The Hurt Locker
Sally Menke, Inglourious Basterds
Joe Klotz, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
My Thoughts: Had this not been a ten-wide Best Picture field, this still would have been roughly the lineup you would have expected from Oscar. You have three Best Picture nominees that clearly were destined for this category, a Best Picture nominee that made it based on its high stature in top races and this was a gravy slot, and a tech-infused movie that could not be ignored despite it not making a play in larger categories. As it stands, though, all five of these were Best Picture nominees, making a category that almost always mirrors 80% of the Best Picture lineup instead match up 100%.
Typing Sally Menke's name broke my heart a little bit just now, so I'll start with her to get the sadness over her recent passing out of my head. Basterds, like all of Quentin Tarantino's films, truly is made-or-broken by Menke's hand. If it were up to Tarantino, he'd just make large, bloated epics which contained every flourish (Tarantino is a director of great vision, but not enough ability to scale back when he needs to, and with each passing film he gets further and further away from the compact genius of Pulp Fiction). People frequently cite Basterds as a companion piece to his next film Django Unchained, but almost no one says the latter is the better picture, which is in large part due to Menke's careful hand. Each chapter of the film feels vaguely connected to the next, without ever sacrificing the larger vision of a series of short films (which is clearly what Tarantino is going for before the final climax). I particularly loved the contrast between the thick line between the films' chapters and the way that Tarantino/Menke work almost every scene in an extended shot-rarely within a chapter do we move to a close-up without clear reason, and frequently we're exploring the scenes from the characters' points of view and not the audience's. It's a great trick, and one of many Menke employs in the making of this movie.
It's about time I start to dissect my feelings toward The Hurt Locker. The Best Picture winner (there's no need for spoiler alerts here-we all know it wins), like it's Bigelow-successor Zero Dark Thirty has grown in my respect since I first saw it and was in an admire but not love sort of mood. I'm curious, though, as I write these specific pieces on each aspect of the film if it ends up improving in my thoughts. I started out not being crazy high on Zero Dark Thirty, but in the end I gave it all five OVP awards it was nominated for in the 2012 write-ups (including this category), so perhaps Bigelow is better in thoroughly discussed doses.
The film does have strong editing, if nothing else. The movie needs to get you inside the head of Sergeant James when he's disarming a bomb, and it maintains the right extended shot pacing to keep the adrenaline throughout most of these scenes. It's worth noting that while these scenes, as well as the ones outside of the war zone, are all quite strong, I didn't feel the same about the rest of the movie. The movie falls a bit hard on conflicting personalities (principally between Jeremy Renner's James and Anthony Mackie's Sanborn) and into the cliche of army brotherhood/war is hell without adding enough newness for my taste. I have to respect the escalating suspense built by the editors (and Mark Boal's screenplay)-you never can tell who will live and who will die, and the actual process of editing in such conditions surely needs to be commended, but I just don't feel that I will ever reach this film in the way that I ended up doing with Zero Dark Thirty, and I don't think the editing is as rigorous and methodical as the latter picture.
Avatar is the sort of film you instantly know will be nominated here so much so that you don't really think about whether it should, and I hadn't until this moment. Like The Hurt Locker, it relies principally on incredibly strong action sequences and lesser dialogue/plot-building scenes. I'm trying very hard with the 2009 write-ups to only give credit to who was actually in charge of a specific scene, but with Avatar the other elements cannot be removed from the gargantuan visual spectacle, and if we were to judge solely on this element, we'd find ourselves with another easy win. Cameron and his fellow editors (anyone else not realize that the director was the editor of this movie-this branch doesn't usually go for double-dipping?) never sacrifice the wonder of the movie, and the movie actions always seem swift, while still giving us over to the visual wonder of Pandora. However, I cannot say that the movie couldn't have used some trimming and expanding, particularly with the central love story (Cameron knows how to handle a love story as evident by his previous Best Picture contender, but the script isn't quite as strong between Neytiri and Jake as it was Jack and Rose), so this isn't the slam dunk that the Visual Effects nomination was.
District 9 feels like the outsider here, doesn't it, even though it was just as much a Best Picture nominee as the other four contenders (it doesn't help the Top 10 argument when this was so clearly a 5/5 year with Best Director). In something of a recurring theme, the film's best edited moments are the action scenes. While this goes hand-and-hand with the cinematographer, the documentary-style filmmaking is aided by the persistent use of low-angle or wider-angle shots when most action filmmakers would have gone with close-ups. The movie's descent (all hope is lost from so early in the film) is mimicked by the quickening actions of the editors, and the tighter and tighter run lengths of each scene. The movie's love story, like Avatar's, falters a bit (unlike Avatar, we don't really need it-one man struggling with his own fleeting humanity is frightening enough without knowing what's on the other side), but I could make the argument that this film's tonal editing is perhaps stronger than Cameron's film.
The final nominee is Precious. Almost every year there's one film that's here because it's a Best Picture contender and for little other reason (The King's Speech, The Descendants, Silver Linings Playbook), and I'm sorry to say that's what Precious is here for. The film employs only a couple sporadic dream sequences (one of which was used in the trailer-maybe the editing branch only watched that and thought the film was more inventive than it was?). Otherwise, I see nothing remotely unique or "wow" about this film's structure. The movie is quite good, and the two leading women are amazing, but even if we call editing the "silent art," I just don't think this is loud enough to merit mention.
Other Precursor Contenders: Like so many of the guild awards, the Eddie's split their feature films into multiple categories (here, it's comedy and drama). Therefore, we're left with the comedic Hangover (the winner), 500 Days of Summer, A Serious Man, Julie and Julia, and It's Complicated all cited when they weren't remotely close to Oscar consideration and The Hurt Locker, Avatar, District 9, Star Trek, and Up in the Air all in the Drama category (The Hurt Locker won). BAFTA was quite similar to Oscar, swapping only Precious for Up in the Air (another major Best Picture contender, and probably the film that was in sixth place). The Hurt Locker once again emerged victorious (this was the year of the group think, so start getting used to it).
Films I Would Have Nominated: The adage "dying is easy, comedy is hard" is usually brought out when it comes to acting, but tech categories can occasionally be responsible for the laughs on display in a film. (500) Days of Summer, for starters, uses non-chronological storytelling to instill romance and comedy into the audience-it's a tricky feat (think of how easily you could sacrifice too much story with this picture), and AMPAS should have found room to recognize this fact.
Oscar's Choice: For as much the technical achievement as the physicality involved in making the film, the team from The Hurt Locker quite handily took this prize over Avatar.
My Choice: I consulted my notes for these films without consulting how I had ranked them in my notes to try and gain a fresher perspective, and it's genuinely worked: I'm going to give this to Sally Menke, not out of sentiment but out of genuine admiration for how well she structured her film. Second place is District 9, followed by Avatar, The Hurt Locker, and last place Precious (for the curious, I had actually given it to Inglourious in my notes after I double checked my rankings, though second through fifth place shifted a bit).
There you have it-my first contradiction with Oscar of 2009-did you do the same? And was it Sally Menke or one of the other teams that you sided with? And finally, what was the best edited film of 2009?
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