OVP: Best Costume (2001)
The Nominees Were...
Milena Canonero, The Affair of the Necklace
Jenny Beaven, Gosford Park
Judianna Makovsky, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Ngila Dickson & Richard Taylor, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Catherine Martin & Angus Strathie, Moulin Rouge!
My Thoughts: Few years at the Oscars have elicited more Halloween ensembles than the 2001 field for best Costume category. Especially if you consider that Gosford Park would eventually inspire Downton Abbey, this is rife with looks that have been sported every October (even I, with a relative antipathy toward Halloween, have sported one of these looks). This makes grading it a bit challenging-when costumes have entered the zeitgeist on this level, how do you grade it specific to the film, and how do you argue on behalf of the one film that didn't have any pop culture impact whatsoever?
Thankfully, The Affair of the Necklace makes that a lot easier on me. This period drama with a woefully miscast Hilary Swank (Swank, an atypical star in Hollywood, has long-struggled to find her footing in studio films that weren't the ones winning her Oscars) is bizarrely costumed. The film generally doesn't seem to want to be a sort of Sofia Coppola in Marie Antoinette situation; there's no nods to this being a fusion of modern & period...the script is historically-inclined. Yet the costuming is done in a way that that is impossible. Joely Richardson is wearing sunglasses that are far too chic & modern to be believable in this century, and the rest of the costumes are just generic corset work. This is a bust, and Oscar would've been better off ignoring it entirely.
I feel much better about what's being done in Gosford Park. Frequently with period movies, you forget that while everyone dressed of a similar nature, it's not just the same designs in slightly different hues-some people wore a different type of style, and that should reflect in the character designs. Look at the way that Jenny Beavan dresses Kristin Scott Thomas here. The scene where she's wearing a suit (a clear homage to Nora Gregor's hunting costume in The Rules of the Game) shows the sexual politics in the picture. She's playing a sexually voracious woman (she's getting laid by a pouty-mouthed Ryan Phillippe, because, well, you would too if it was 2001 & you had the option) who is also dependent on her husband for money. She's balancing two different worlds-the feminine & masculine, and knows she must succeed in both to get what she wants. This sort of character detailing runs throughout the film, and is proof that few people costume to the script quite like Beaven.
Lord of the Rings is one of those movies where you kind of have to remember what is and isn't introduced in each installment when judging its technical merits, the movies begin to run together so much after repeated viewings. For example, you get the iconic Galadriel look here, one of the best costumes in the series, but not Gandalf the White, Theoden, or a number of orc looks. In general, I think the costumes here are exactly what they're supposed to be-brilliant looks that meld into the world. With the exception of Galadriel and Gandalf, I don't know that there's something that stands out in a way we usually expect here (usually you can name-check a specific design when grading a film), but that shouldn't be how you grade a film. After all, the point of the costumes is for them to make sense in the movie and feel entwined to the characters-Taylor & Dickson get an A+ for that.
Harry Potter is a little bit different in that most of its iconic designs happen in Sorcerer's Stone. There are later characters like Sirius Black, Bellatrix LeStrange, & Dolores Umbridge that come in sequels with great costumes, but this one establishes most of the big characters. You get plucked-from-the-pages perfect looks like Dumbledore, McGonagall, Hagrid, & Quirrell that look as if they were ripped from the books themselves (listen, giving JK Rowling a compliment in 2023 feels icky, but part of why her series defined a generation was because she was very good at descriptive language). If you wanted to get super picky, you could point out that the generic Hogwarts robes (which are appropriate to the books, but eventually abandoned by later designers) deprive us of the character-building we'd get in Azkaban and Goblet of Fire for the students, but that's a small quibble-this film continually hits high notes with the costumes.
Moulin Rouge! is a film that, unlike Affair of the Necklace, does imply (through its musical numbers) that we are meant to see this costume work as both a mix of the classical and the modern. This is why we get Valentino-like designs for some of Nicole Kidman's evening wear, and dresses that could only come in a post-Bob Mackie world. But every look is scrumptious. Sure, it's not period-specific and in many cases it probably shouldn't be possible for a 19th Century sex worker to look this good, but it's meant to be a flight of fantasy. When Kidman, in a thigh-high skirt and top hat, comes out to sing...you know that you're entering a realm of enchantment, and a very special film.
Other Precursor Contenders: The Costume Designer's Guild was only splitting its nominees between Contemporary and Period/Fantasy in 2001, and at that point they were only nominating four films each, so we're seeing only eight contenders. For Period/Fantasy, they honestly got really out-there with their choices (I miss when precursors used to think outside of the box and were just awards and not, well, precursors), with the Oscar-nominated Harry Potter winning against Blow, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Planet of the Apes. For Contemporary, they went with The Royal Tenenbaums atop Legally Blonde, Mulholland Drive, and Ocean's Eleven. BAFTA picked the exact lineup as Oscar save for The Affair of the Necklace (they also went with Planet of the Apes), with Gosford Park winning. I have to assume that the mentions from both major guilds, combined with the designer being Oscar favorite Colleen Atwood makes Planet of the Apes the probable sixth place, though I wouldn't count out Amelie as an option here given it was cited for Art Direction (those two categories used to be the same nominating branch, and as a result had a lot of overlap).
Films I Would Have Nominated: Great list from Oscar with one clear problem child, which I'd have replaced with the pencil skirts Maggie Cheung wore while walking to work in In the Mood for Love.
Oscar's Choice: Maybe the best shot the Harry Potter series ever had at winning an Oscar, it still lost to Moulin Rouge! and the power of Catherine Martin.
My Choice: I'm also going to go with Catherine Martin, just barely over Harry Potter. I think the Harry Potter looks are more iconic, but that's partially to do with the film's box office and book inspiration. What Martin does is play with a new world and gives us designs I don't think anyone else could've done, and that ingenuity is worth a small inch in her direction (it's close though). Fellowship, Gosford Park, and Affair of the Necklace come after, in that order.
And now, it's your turn. Is everyone going to swoon over the duds of Harold Zidler's can-can girls, or does someone want to go with the worlds of Rowling or Tolkien? Was this the closest that Harry Potter ever came to an Oscar victory for the first eight films? And was it Planet of the Apes or Amelie just missing here? Share your thoughts below!
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