OVP: Best Sound (2020)
The Nominees Were...
Warren Shaw, Michael Minkler, Beau Borders, & David Wyman, Greyhound
Ren Klyce, Jeremy Molod, David Parker, Nathan Nance, & Drew Kunin, Mank
Oliver Tarney, Mike Prestwood Smith, William Miller, & John Pritchett, News of the World
Ren Klyce, Coya Elliott, & David Parker, Soul
Nicholas Becker, Jaime Baksht, Michellee Couttolenc, Carlos Cortes, & Phillip Bladh, Sound of Metal
My Thoughts: The best Sound category from a practical standpoint has not had a great last two years at the Oscars, and I'm not saying that in terms of the quality of the nominees but the category itself. In 2020, after decades of splitting between Sound Mixing & Editing (and decades of me explaining to people the differences between the two categories), the category was combined in 2020, so we have our first ever "new/retired" category we've profiled now (editor's note: we will cover all of the categories save for the Documentaries & Short Subjects as we move further back, so when we eventually get to categories like Song Score or Dance Direction, they'll get their own articles). Obviously, in 2021, the category was adiosed all-together from the ceremony, relegated to the commercials (something I hope they fix in 2022).
One of the questions I had going into 2020 was whether or not a combined category would be friendlier to movies that historically have been favored in Mixing (like musicals or epics) to Editing (like effects films & animated features), and judging by this slate alone, it seems like the latter was the favorite. Soul became the first animated movie in over a decade to compete for Best Sound, and what a worthy welcoming back to the club this was for Pixar. The beautifully-melded soundtrack (both the Jon Batiste jazz numbers and the score that accompanies the rest of the movie) fit seamlessly with the picture, and everything about the heaven sequences sounds divine. Not forced to differentiate between Mixing & Editing here, I don't have to suss through which is better (though it's the editing...that's the case for virtually all animated films), and can just give this a big thumbs up.
Greyhound likely would've only been up in editing as well in a split category. This is also superb, and one of the higher-ranked movies on my "I wish I'd seen it on a big-screen" list because of the sound work. The way that we have period naval noises in the movie msemerizes, with the technology of a submarine against the constant ocean current. The movie does a magnificent job of not just making the action sequences feel authentic, but downright terrifying. After all, we are not just under enemy fire, but we are also in the middle of a cavernous ocean-it's not just bullets but simply falling off the edge that's going to destroy you in this scenario, and Greyhound gives us a three-dimensional sound that makes this feel authentic.
Tom Hanks featured in two movies in this category (hence him being pictured twice above), but News of the World (which is a fine movie...I feel like I'm ragging on it more than I expected in these write-ups) doesn't measure up in the same way. The actual news reading scenes are good but not superb in the way you'd expect from a sound nominee, and nothing else in the film (not the gun fight scenes, not the wagons, nothing) feels like it really stands out. This is one of those nominees where there's nothing wrong with it...but it's certainly not good enough for an Oscar nomination.
Sound of Metal, on the other hand, the sound work is the reason to go to the movie. The film gets much of its strength by getting inside the mind of a man who is slowly losing his hearing. The way that we experience that as an audience, understanding the sacrifices he's making, particularly in the end when he listens to a tinny, aluminum version of the world that doesn't resemble the audible one he once experienced...it's jaw-dropping stuff. Obviously with a movie like this it's hard to not phone in certain parts of the film, and there are large gaps where the audio technicians aren't giving us the same wizardry as key scenes, but that's like expecting every scene in Spider-Man: No Way Home to be as impactful as the ones where Andrew & Tobey show up...it's impossible.
Mank is also at the top of its sound game. From the film's opening scenes, it feels like we've been dropped in a cavernous realm outside of time-and-space, where everything is sort of counting down to the inevitable. I loved the dreamy way that Orson Welles is treated in the movie from a sound perspective-Welles is hidden behind an echo, as if he can only be summoned through a dream. At once it borrows from Citizen Kane (giving homage to a film through sound alone is not easy, though the Mank team does it), but also through the continued ravaging of the title character's memories...we are getting lost in this world with each echo-y scene transition.
Other Precursor Contenders: The Cinema Audio Society splits its nominations between Live Action and Animated, so we have two slates of nominees here. For Live Action we've got the victorious Sound of Metal against Greyhound, Mank, News of the World, and The Trial of the Chicago 7 while animated favored Soul atop Shaun the Sheep Movie, Onward, The Croods: A New Age, and Trolls 2: World Tour. BAFTA went for nearly a replica of the Oscar list, with Sound of Metal winning and the only new nominee being Nomadland (in place of Mank). In terms of sixth place, I'm going to guess it was Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, because the following year West Side Story proved that it could get musicals in again, though it'll honestly take a few years to understand if you have to be a Best Picture musical (or just a movie with music) to get in in a combined category.
Films I Would Have Nominated: This is a pretty good list, all things considered, though I do wish they'd found room for The Midnight Sky, whose use of wind and ability to combine sound on Earth, a celestial moon, and a spaceship in distinctive ways deserved mention even if the film itself was dry.
Oscar’s Choice: Generally the best way to win this category is to include the word "Sound" in the title, which is exactly what got the Sound of Metal team their victory (also, being really good).
My Choice: I have a Film Twitter friend who's going to murder me if he reads this article and finds out I did this, but I'm going to give the nod just slightly to Mank over Sound of Metal. The technical highs of Sound of Metal are impossible to match, but Mank I feel is the more committed piece overall (it's very close though-Oscar picked a very strong victor). Third place would be Soul, followed by Greyhound and News of the World.
Those are my choices-how about you? Are you joining pretty much everyone with Sound of Metal or do you dare to be different by picking Mank as your #1? Are you bummed like me that we don't have the beautiful symmetry of the two sound categories separated out anymore? And why do you think it took so long for another animated movie to feature in this field? Share your thoughts in the comments!
No comments:
Post a Comment