Reverse Angle:
What new Oscar categories should be adopted?
All together now
Once again, it’s time to stump for an Oscar category for stunts, as well as urging the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to reinstate the adapted-song score category. What else should the academy adopt, you ask? (And its dying to hear.)
An ensemble acting category. The Screen Actors Guild does it, and for good reason. Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams deserve the acclaim they’ve received for their outstanding work in “Spotlight,” but how does one single them out from the other parts of that welloiled machine?
For this year’s should-be contenders, look no further than SAG’s well-selected field: “Beasts of No Nation,” “The Big Short,” “Straight Outta Compton,” “Trumbo” and winner “Spotlight.” To that list, one could add “The Hateful Eight” and “Steve Jobs.”
Trivia question
There have been only three movies whose entire credited casts were nominated for acting Oscars. What are they?
Sounds complicated
What are the hardest races to call in your Oscar pool every year? The sound categories are always tricky — most folks outside the industry don’t understand the difference between “sound mixing” and “sound editing” — and this year, the production design category gets no help from the guild awards.
When it comes to sound, think of “mixing” as audio recorded at the time of shooting — imagine how tough that would be under the circumstances of “The Revenant.” Think of “editing” as sound added in post — R2-D2’s signature beeps or Chewbacca’s … whatever those are. There’s a reason Lucasfilm’s Randy Thom (nominated again this year for “The Revenant”) and Ben Burtt are living legends in their fields.
The Oscar nominees for mixing (“Bridge of Spies,” “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “The Martian,” “The Revenant” and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”) are mirrored by the Cinema Audio Society’s CAS Awards nominees, with “The Hateful Eight” replacing “The Martian.” The CAS winners will be announced Saturday, Feb. 20 … but they’ve only matched the Oscar winner six of the last 10 times.
Meanwhile, the winner of the Motion Picture Sound Editors’ Golden Reel for “sound effects and Foley in a feature film” has matched up with the Oscar eight of the last 10 times …
Those awards won’t be given out until the night before the Oscars (Feb. 27), so probably too late for your pool.
Tricky by design
Predictors of the production-design category get no help from the Art Directors Guild awards, which are split over three categories. “The Revenant” won for period film, “Mad Max: Fury Road” for fantasy and “The Martian” for contemporary. Those would have already seemed to be the three favorites (out of the five Oscar nominees), and each makes a strong case.
Coldhearted?
Most of us who’ve seen “Titanic” and cared enough to think about such things have wondered if Leonardo DiCaprio really had to turn into a Jacksicle at the end, or if he and Rose (Kate Winslet) could have found a way to balance on that floating door together.
“MythBusters” put their spoilsport brains to the problem a few years ago, determining that using Rose’s life jacket for extra buoyancy under the door would have allowed both to survive. Of course, one can’t blame the young characters for not thinking of that after all they’d been through. And James Cameron himself cited dramatic necessity, telling a United Kingdom newspaper, “Wait a minute, I’m going to call up William Shakespeare and ask why Romeo and Juliet had to die.”
Winslet herself thawed out the argument recently on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” by saying, “I think he actually could have fitted on that door.”
Trivia answer
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” the two-hander “Sleuth” (the 1972 original with Michael Caine and Sir Laurence Olivier) and the one-man show “Give ’Em Hell, Harry!” starring James Whitmore.