OVP: Best Film Editing (2021)
The Nominees Were...
Hank Corwin, Don't Look Up
Joe Walker, Dune
Pamela Martin, King Richard
Peter Sciberras, The Power of the Dog
Myron Kerstein & Andrew Weisblum, tick, tick...BOOM!
My Thoughts: Thanks to me making a slight error, we're going out of order this week, as we usually follow Visual Effects with Film Editing, but I published Costume early, so you're getting Film Editing today (all links at the bottom of the page). In the ten-wide fields (which I now know for the next season we profile after 2021 we'll also have a ten-wide as I've completed my viewings for it), this is almost always filled with Best Picture nominations, and with one exception, this is the case in 2021. Looking at this lineup, this is a weird time for Film Editing because it's easy to see why all five of these were nominated (not always the case in a category that sometimes just picks the films most likely to win Best Picture), but not easy to condone all of them.
Let's start with the one non-Best Picture nominee of the bunch, Tick Tick Boom (the punctuation is too hard to get every time-if you want the real title, see in the nominees list). Tick Tick has the advantage of being a musical, and one that has a heightened sense of reality, sometimes leaning in fully into the world of a traditional screen musical (like the number at the diner), while at other times (such as Garfield's number with Vanessa Hudgens entitled "Therapy") it feels like we're going full-on Rob Marshall stage production mode. I quite like this movie, and don't really begrudge it this nomination, but I do feel like we could do better. It doesn't have the same ingenuity as even, say, the musical that was nominated for Best Picture, West Side Story, trying to play with camera angles and giving us a more consistent stylistic structure to the film.
King Richard is here for one reason, and one reason only-those tennis scenes. Tennis is the one sport I kind of know something about when it comes to how it's supposed to look (a brief fandom into the sport driven largely by Andy Murray that has waned as Murray hits his career twilight brought me some background knowledge here), and they do a good job of piecing those scenes together. However, the actual story here is badly-constructed. The editors don't always have control over the script, but it's hard for me not to fault them (pun not intended) when they miss a major story beat. Look at Aunjanue Ellis' speech about fidelity that comes out of nowhere & is never really touched on again (in real-life, Richard Williams had extremely complicated relationships with his non-tennis star children & left his wife for a much younger woman). This is sloppy editing, and either needs to be built toward or left out of the movie entirely.
I think Dune handles its issues much-better. Dune is a much better adaptation of Frank Herbert's dense (sometimes unfilmable) novel, and it gains a lot by being sparing. We get insights into this world through visual language as much as we do the script itself. The editors are given that task, not an easy one (but one they're successful in achieving) while also having to make an incomplete (it's very much split into two) movie feel whole on its own. That all happens. There are moments where the editing might resemble a perfume ad (let's be honest-Zendaya's character here feels a bit silly without the context of the second movie), but overall I think this works, and might be the most challenging of the five films listed today.
The Power of the Dog also succeeds, telling a fascinating tale through its editing. I sometimes feel like I might intertwine writing & editing too much, because in my mind they have a similar task-creating a story that works within the confines of the movie. That's true here, but also because they're using the visual language in addition to the writing itself. Look at the ways that certain aspects of the film's twists are hinted at throughout (nothing about the film's ending should surprise you). Look also at the way that they handle each character, like Dunst's descent into alcoholism or Smit-McPhee's sexuality being coyer than the audience realizes. All of this is done with a very judicious, meticulous editing team that gives us the movie's big payoff ending.
The final film is a mess. I'm bummed Oscar nominated Don't Look Up is in as many categories as it is (it deserved none of those citations), but editing...come on now, this is maybe your worst one. Adam McKay's The Big Short is a movie I liked because it found a frenetic pacing to go with its ridiculous cast of characters. But his next two movies were a joke by comparison, and even The Big Short's editing was one of its lousier achievements. The movie cannot handle its all-star cast (what exactly is the point of Timothee Chalamet here, a question I never thought I'd ask?), frequently feels like it goes on tangents that are mostly there to elicit "lolz" or underline a metaphor that the audience understands from the trailer. The editing is choppy, pasted-together, and looks bad.
Other Precursor Contenders: The ACE Eddie Awards separate their categories between Comedy/Musical and Drama, so we have ten nominations here. For Drama, we have King Richard perched atop Belfast, Dune, No Time to Die, & The Power of the Dog, while Comedy picked Tick Tick Boom against Cruella, Don't Look Up, The French Dispatch, & Licorice Pizza. BAFTA gave their trophy to No Time to Die, with Belfast, Dune, Licorice Pizza, & Summer of Soul getting the nominations. In terms of sixth place, I predicted Belfast at the time, and while precursors were kinder to No Time to Die and Licorice Pizza, Belfast was over-nominated in enough categories that I think it was probably just below the surface here.
Films I Would Have Nominated: I don't entirely understand why West Side Story missed. For a film that made it in most of the other categories you would have expected it, this is a bizarre exclusion. Think of the celebrated sequence at the dance hall where they piece together a seemingly invisible one-track sequence, or the precision with all of the musical numbers-that's all made in the editing room, and I for one would've found space for it.
Oscar's Choice: Dune took this one against King Richard (which I suspect would've won had just the editing branch been in charge of voting), but Dune swept the tech categories & this went along-for-the-ride.
My Choice: I get the Dune love (it'll be nominated for me on My Ballot at the end of this season), but I'm going to give this to The Power of the Dog, which uses its editing more in service to the story, and doesn't have any fat left on it. Following these two would be Tick Tick Boom, King Richard, and WAY in the back, Don't Look Up.
Those are my thoughts-what are yours? Do you prefer the visual aura of Dune or are you on the more story-based work in The Power of the Dog? At what point is the Academy going to make me stop sitting through the increasingly bad films of Adam McKay? And why do you think the Academy skipped West Side Story here? Share your thoughts below!
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