Architecture has a starring role at Oscars
It’s that time again! The blocks around the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood have been transformed into a security zone worthy of Baghdad in wartime in preparation for Oscars 2024. I’ll be watching the spectacle from under the fleece Virgen cobija I picked up at Smart & Final.
Some of the most intriguing characters I saw on the big screen this Oscar season didn’t utter a single word. I’m talking about the architecture — namely houses — which not only help set the scene but also channel over-the-top fantasy, willful ignorance and roiling marital conflict. Among the nominees for best picture, you’ll find Barbie Dreamhouses, a woodsy chalet, hallucinatory visions of various European cities and a 1930s villa that sits at the literal ledge of death.
Let’s start with that chalet, which is a centerpiece of Justine Triet‘s brilliantly absorbing “Anatomy of a Fall.” Set in the French Alps outside Grenoble, the chalet might at first seem an object of luxury. (Those staggering Alpine views!) But close inspection reveals a home that is frayed at the edges, like the couple that inhabits it. A roughhewn attic provides a key setup for the film’s plot: Samuel, a struggling novelist, is attempting to insulate the space when he falls to his death from the window. Did he slip? Or jump? Was he pushed by his frustrated wife, Sandra (the fabulous Sandra Hüller), who is also a novelist?
That is a secret the chalet seems intent on holding close.
Far more chilling is the comfortable family villa that appears in Jonathan Glazer‘s “The Zone of Interest.” To be certain, the home is lovely: a boxy, two-story villa with Modernist flourishes, like the geometric handrail that bends around the stairs. Naturally, there is a garden, bursting with vegetables and flowers — as well as a welcoming swimming pool. But this idyllic little complex shares a wall of concrete with the death camp next door.
The villa belongs to Nazi commander Rudolf Höss (played by Christian Friedel), who oversees the extermination machine that is Auschwitz as his wife and children go about their banal daily routines. They swim, they eat, they get ready for school as gunshots echo in the distance and crematoria belch coal-colored soot. Glazer keeps a tight focus on the home, making it a disquieting frame through which to see (or, more accurately, hear) the genocide going on. (Production designer Christopher Oddy studied the real Rudolf Höss’ home before re-creating it at another site near Auschwitz; Curbed has a great interview with him about the process.)
To see mass murder is terrifying; to hear it echoed within the walls of a wellappointed home illustrates all the ways in which ordinary people can be complicit in the most horrifying acts.
This season, however, isn’t just about death and the tenuous nature of truth. Architecture was also used in film to spin cotton candy visions. Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” — which is also up for an Oscar in production design — literally wiped out the supply of pink paint at its supplier Rosco with its hyper pink constructions.
To create Barbie Land, production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer reviewed decades of Barbie Dreamhouses, ultimately settling on a set inspired by Midcentury design — which is the era in which the original Barbie Dreamhouse (an apartment) has its roots.
All that cookie-cutter Mattel Modernism, thankfully, is interrupted by Weird Barbie‘s angular hilltop home, which appears to marry German Expressionism with Postmodern design — in my view, the most interesting home in the movie. (Somebody please give Weird Barbie her own film, or at least her own home design line.)
When it comes to fantasy, however, no film came through quite like Yorgos Lanthimos’ stellar “Poor Things” — also nominated for production design — whose sets added a heavy dollop of surrealism and saturated blasts of color to familiar settings like Neoclassical British townhouses, the baroque architecture of Lisbon and the flying buttresses of wintry Paris.
To illustrate this retelling of the Frankenstein tale, production designers Shona Heath and James Price did their own Frankensteining of different architectural elements to create singular urban and domestic environments. Moreover, elements of the human body were slipped into the design of the sets: from the penisshaped windows that illuminate a Paris bordello to the human ears that protrude from the ceiling of the eccentric townhouse occupied by Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). The townhouse looks like it was designed by 19th century British Neoclassicist John Soane, if Soane had regularly done shrooms. (Highly recommend a virtual visit to the Soane house museum in London for reference.)
All in all, the set design is staggering — as is the ebullient costume design. The charismatic Emma Stone, as the impulsive, surgically altered Bella Baxter, is liable to single-handedly bring back puff sleeves and ruffled capes. (You can already find elements of her look available online at bit.ly/poorthingscostume)
The season has been a visual feast.
And thank goodness for that, because the 2024 Oscars stage is decidedly not. Renderings for the set reveal a stage framed by forms evoking draped fabric — lots and lots of fabric — in the neutral shades of Kim Kardashian’s Skims. Renderings are not always a good indication of reality; here’s hoping it all renders well on TV.
This article is taken from the March 9 edition of the Essential Arts newsletter, a look at what's happening in the L.A. scene, plus openings, critics' picks and more. Sign up at latimes.com/newsletters.