OVP: Best Costume (2006)
The Nominees Were...
Yee Chung Man, Curse of the Golden Flower
Patricia Field, The Devil Wears Prada
Sharen Davis, Dreamgirls
Milena Canonero, Marie Antoinette
Consolata Boyle, The Queen
My Thoughts: Corsets, queens, ball gowns, sequins, and, wait...do mine eyes deceive me? Is that a (gasp) contemporary design in the Costume Designers field? While we've had films that have come close (I Am Love is really only meant to be ten years old and La La Land is definitely contemporary, even if it involves that abstract ballet sequence), The Devil Wears Prada is the first film in the Oscar Viewing Project that won an Oscar nomination for contemporary design rather than period or fantasy work. It is, in fact, the only film this century to pull off this feat to date, and so we are definitely starting with this movie.
The film got its nomination in large part due to its subject matter. Patricia Field (most famous for her work in the Sex and the City franchise), was given a wide playground to work with styling in a Vogue-inspired workplace. She takes advantage of this by giving us a lot of character detail in the work that she does, particularly comparing the characters played by Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, & Anne Hathaway. Notice how Field makes Streep's Miranda effortless-playing to designs that she's honed for decades, while Blunt is cutting-edge with her fashion, wearing the looks that Miranda "picked for her" rather than standing out with her own style. This is smart character design, and it adds to the bountiful closets of the movie itself.
Devil didn't win the Oscar (you have to go back to 1994 to find a true contemporary design winner), which instead favored Marie Antoinette and Milena Canonero (who has won an Oscar in four separate decades, an enviable sign of a career well-worn). The looks here are fantastic. Canonero of course steals a bit from Barry Lyndon (but honestly, which costume designer since hasn't borrowed from Barry Lyndon?), but she creates a feminine allure to the costumes that was lacking in the Kubrick film-there's so much pastel wonder in the work she's doing here giving Sofia Coppola's picture a museum-like quality that the script is lacking. The film wants us to see Marie Antoinette as more than a porcelain doll, but the only person who is achieving that (for my money) is Canonero, whose modern touches remind us this historical punchline was, in fact, a real woman.
Taking place on the other side of the world is the other sumptuous feast of costume design, Curse of the Golden Flower. This film is not as well remembered by most as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Hero, or House of Flying Daggers, partially because while Pan's Labyrinth did keep foreign-language films in solid box office business in 2006, the American public's 1998-2004 curiosity with them had started to peak by this time. The film is the corset I was alluding to above, because its most fantastic piece of costume decoration is Gong Li's ornate, golden bodice, but really everything about this film, particularly its gargantuan headdresses, is something else. This is an okay movie that oftentimes gets weighed down by having just too much going on, and to a degree that happens with the costumes (they will distract from the actual performances onscreen), but there's no denying the beauty and scale of this film's costume work (spoiler alert-I'd nominate it too).
The other two films don't equal these three in either scale or intrinsic character work. Dreamgirls is in some ways handicapped by Sharen Davis trying to find looks that match all of the actresses in the picture (the Dreams all wear matching looks, so there's less room for actual character design within them). She also struggles with one of the central problems with the movie. This is clearly meant to be parodying the Supremes, and Davis gives us looks that feel like they're paying homage to Diana Ross during each era, but the performances, particularly Beyonce's, don't really mirror some of the personality of Ross, so it feels like a bit of discord. We'll talk about this a bit later as we get further into the movie itself, but Beyonce is not a strong actor (I know this is risking the internet's wrath, but it needs to be said), and as she is the centerpiece of most of the looks, it's hard to say anything other than "she looks good" with these dresses...which isn't a challenge, as Beyonce always looks good.
The same can be said for The Queen. In some ways this is an atypical nomination (like I Am Love, the looks recreated here are not particularly old), though they are dressing a monarch, something that Oscar loves so much this is the third such film in this category. The film, like Dreamgirls, doesn't really give us much information with the clothing that Queen Elizabeth is wearing. Mirren is giving a much better performance than Beyonce, but the costumes aren't doing much work-this is looks really just like the designers went into Harrods with an American Express black card, bought a dozen very expensive dresses, and called it a day. This is recreationist work, but it's not that impressive & it's not character-building in way Prada is.
Other Precursor Contenders: The Costume Designers Guild separates its nominations into Contemporary, Fantasy, & Period. Contemporary was a bit of a cheat, with The Queen (despite it not being contemporary in reality) taking the trophy over Babel, Casino Royale, Little Miss Sunshine, and The Devil Wears Prada. Fantasy favored Pan's Labyrinth over Eragon, The Fountain, V for Vendetta, and X-Men: The Last Stand, while Period went to Curse of the Golden Flower against Dreamgirls, Marie Antoinette, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (how is this not fantasy?), and The Illusionist. BAFTA also went with Pan's Labyrinth, besting Devil, Marie Antoinette, Pirates, and The Queen. In terms of sixth, I have to assume Pan's Labyrinth, with a BAFTA, CDG, and an Oscar for Art Direction (all three the best precursor options) is not only sixth place, but might be the biggest on-paper upset this century.
Films I Would Have Nominated: Let's add "my ballot" to Pan's Labyrinth precursor list as well. The costume work here is great, potentially overshadowed by the Makeup team, but it shouldn't be-this is a strong look at Franco's Spain.
Oscar's Choice: Canonero won, likely over...Curse of the Golden Flower? That sounds about right.
My Choice: I'll be real here, this isn't like the best lineup that we'll see in 2006, and I realize that is the case for both mine and Oscar's fields (real talk-axiomatically if there are strong years for a category, there are weak years, and this is a weak year for glorious costuming). That said, Marie Antoinette gets this over Devil, which I'm a little bummed by as giving an OVP statue to a contemporary film is definitely something I'm hoping to achieve at some point. Third is Golden Flower, followed by Dreamgirls and The Queen.
And now, of course, it's your turn. Is everyone onboard with Marie Antoinette, or does someone favor a different nominee? What's it going to take to get another contemporary nomination in this field again? And why do you think Pan's Labyrinth got snubbed for this (it likely would've won had it been cited)? Share your thoughts below!
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