OVP: Best Film Editing (2001)
The Nominees Were...
Mike Hill & Dan Hanley, A Beautiful Mind
Pietro Scalia, Black Hawk Down
John Gilbert, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Dody Dorn, Memento
Jill Bilcock, Moulin Rouge!
My Thoughts: On our third outing here, I think it's worth noting something that's going to become a recurring theme. 2001 was, as I mentioned in our kickoff, a year where I was paying attention to the Oscars in a big way, but it was also a year where I was starting to gain my own perspective. For years previously, I think my maturity level was still growing, and so what I found fun wasn't necessarily what Oscar found fun. This was the first year where those two tastes really merged (looking at my "Oscars" from that year, I cited a number of films that resonated with the Academy), and as luck would have it, a lot of my taste has stayed the same in the years that followed, so this is going to be one of my favorite years to write about because Oscar honestly had great taste.
That's very true in the editing category, where we have movies like The Fellowship of the Ring among our nominees. Peter Jackson's films in a lot of ways understood where movies were headed, giving us installments of a gigantic story rather than concrete, stand-alone pictures. But what's terrific about his movies is they don't read that way, especially when you first see them. The way that Fellowship is structured it's simultaneously telling one small story (about how a group of friends were willing to go into the impossible together, and find their own bravery along the way) as well as the larger story of the destruction of the ring (which would stretch across three films...honestly six if you want to look at some of the Hobbit's subplots). Combined with perfectly introducing a couple dozen important characters and a complicated backstory with relatively little fat, Fellowship is a brilliant example of editing.
Memento, on the other hand, is an example of how editing can be used to tell a story. One of Christopher Nolan's earliest movies, the film takes place backward, where we see what happened last first, and the way that it will unfold as a murderer with amnesia can't understand his previous actions (and we, as the audience, don't know whom to trust). I love Memento-I always like Nolan as a director, but am not always sold on him as a screenwriter, but here he pulls off every trick, and that's largely to do with his editing team understanding the assignment. We get specific repeated imagery, scenes cut in ways that make a rewatch of the film like a puzzle we already know how it will be put together...the mysteries of the film have to both make sense & be unsolvable so that the film will end in the right spot. The movie's editors pull that off.
A Beautiful Mind is the one film in this bunch that feels off to me, like the Academy was simply citing it because they figured the Best Picture winner should be here somewhere (this has become less of a harbinger of success, but there was a time that the Editing branch always called the Best Picture winner amongst its nominees). This film's editing tricks are the shifting lights & floating numbers as we get into the mind of John Nash, but I'll be honest-I feel like that's more a testament to Russell Crowe's expressive eyes & James Horner's remarkable score. The film itself plays out so it's easy to spot the twists around Paul Bettany & Ed Harris, and it's too conventional to really marvel at from any angle.
This isn't the case for Black Hawk Down, a good war film that has largely been forgotten in the past couple of decades (this is the risk of representing a war onscreen that isn't one that dominated newspaper headlines or CNN banners). The editing is quite well-constructed. With a war movie like this, it needs constant tension, and the way it moves it's not letting up. I can say other things about, say, the script (which uses way too much cliche in the dialogue), but the titular scene is mesmerizing, and we get nice interludes into many of the soldiers' lives so that we actually care as we go.
Moulin Rouge! is not the most technically difficult (Memento is) or the movie that had the most piecing together (Lord of the Rings and Black Hawk Down would've had more effects sequences to combine), but it is the film that is playing with the most risk of alienating the audience. Combining the old (this is a 19th Century tale) with the new (songs by Elton John & Sting), you have to find a way to make the movie feel gleeful, sporadic, romantic but not too edgy, silly, or disjointed. They do that-this is a movie that teeters on a knife's edge into self-parody, but never crosses it, and becomes both singular & genuinely moving. That's a miracle from the editing room.
Other Precursor Contenders: The ACE Eddie Awards separate their categories between Comedy/Musical and Drama, so we have eleven nominations here (they got greedy). For Drama, Pietro Scalia got the statue for Black Hawk Down atop A Beautiful Mind, Harry Potter, Memento, and The Fellowship of the Ring, while for Comedy/Musical, we got a six-wide field that featured a victorious Moulin Rouge atop Amelie, Gosford Park, Monsters Inc, Shrek, and The Royal Tenenbaums. BAFTA gave its statue to Mulholland Drive (I didn't remember that either), besting Amelie, Black Hawk Down, Fellowship of the Ring, and Moulin Rouge!. In terms of sixth place...Harry Potter or Amelie are the best bets...I kind of think Harry Potter, which was more of a threat for the Best Picture field than I think you'd assume given the film's subsequent reputation as being a building block in the JK Rowling franchise rather than one of its best entries.
Films I Would Have Nominated: If Fellowship pulls off somehow being multiple things at once, and Memento tells a tale backward as if it's forward, AI: Artificial Intelligence's editing trick is how we constantly want to reach back. The climax of the film doesn't work unless we understand how ephemeral it is, and that means structuring the picture so that you keep seeing mistakes that can't be undone. I love that aspect of the film, and would've wanted it in a pretty strong field.
Oscar's Choice: In a wide-open field, Black Hawk Down pulled off the victory against the two Best Picture frontrunners.
My Choice: In a tough race, I'm going to give the edge to Memento, dealing Peter Jackson's Fellowship (my silver) its first loss for the Oscars. I think it's more technically impressive, and it's hard to ignore how central the editing is to the success of the movie. Behind them I'd go Black Hawk, Moulin Rouge, and then A Beautiful Mind.
Those are my thoughts-what are yours? Do you want to go with the Academy's love of war films or would you prefer to solve a mystery with me? Why do you think Oscar ignored both of the Best Picture frontrunners in a category that is famous for being a coattails win? And was Amelie or Harry Potter the near miss in this category? Share your thoughts below!
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