Ten for Monday: Oscar races

10. Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, 1985
Won: Out of Africa (Stephen B. Grimes, Josie MacAvin)
Also nominated:
Brazil (Norman Garwood, Maggie Gray)
The Color Purple (J. Michael Riva, Bo Welch, Linda DeScenna)
Ran (Muraki Yoshirô, Muraki Shinobu)
Witness (Stan Jolley, John H. Anderson)

Best Art Direction, like Best Costume Design, typically selects its nominees using a very narrow set of preferences, and while the results are often deserving, they also suffer from an irritating sameness. Which is what makes it such a treat when either of those categories go at all far afield, and this is about as far afield as it gets: only The Color Purple “feels” like an Oscary movie here, and even that would be one of the edgier nominees in a lot of years. Out of Africa is an unusual-looking early 20th Century period piece, while Witness, however much it relies on its production design to tell the story, is too weird a blend of times and tones to qualify as a shoe-in just because of that barn-raising scene. As for the two best nominees here Ran is, after all, Japanese, despite looking beautiful in the most Academy-friendly way, and while Brazil‘s legendary and iconic design ought to feel like it was a lock, it pays to remember how much Brazil was not on the radar in 1985. 

The no-doubt-about-it worst of these, Atonement, is still one of the smartest-looking mid-century period pieces of modern times, with McGarvey able to save even the gaudiest of director Joe Wright’s visual conceits with skill and class. And the other four are all unimpeachable: Kaminski’s work is ill-served by shaky direction, but it still has as much imagination and cunning as anything he’s done, while Elswit and Deakins both turn in career-best work, in careers that are certainly not wanting for high points. Indeed, all three films put in a strong bid for title of best-shot movie of the last 25 years, making it a little bit easier to swallow the fact that Deakins couldn’t even win it when he had a 40% chance.

 

I’m not sure which is more telling: that the winner, and easily my least-favorite here, is nonetheless one of the very best of all the ’70s chamber-dramas-about-the-Zeitgeist, with a stunning ensemble cast; or that Jaws, one of the most perfect action-thrillers of all time and the best popcorn movie in history, would only have come in third on my ballot, behind Nashville‘s condensation of America at the dawn of its third century into a sprawling cityscape of pitch-perfect stories and moments, and Barry Lyndon‘s absolute reinvention of the artistic heights to which a costume drama could possible reach. Add in DDA, the second-best film of Sidney Lumet’s career, and a magnificently nervy tale of urban life during the social chaos of the day, and you have an irreproachable blend of stories about the modern day and historical movements, outstanding character work and genre experiment, and as flawless a capsule of “this is what great cinema looked like in 1975” as anyone could ever hope to assemble.

 

The legendary battle between two of the great film performances of the post-war era, Davis’s epically bitchy theater diva and Swanson’s grandly insane movie diva ended, of course, with the crowning of a neophyte, but it’s not fair to jump all over Holliday, as some have taken occasion to do; she’s incredible in a role that almost demands to be played more broadly and simply than she does here, in a performance so sly that it is impossible to appreciate just how deep it runs until a second or even third viewing. Baxter was never going to win with her co-star in the mix, but it’s still a brilliant turn, far subtler and less theatrical and a perfect fit because of it, and you have to hand it to the Academy; if it came out today, she’d undoubtedly be thrown in Supporting Actress, but they had none of that bullshit in 1950. Parker is obviously the fifth wheel here; I’ll admit to not having much use for her most of the time, but she’s pretty damn great – career-best great, right in her big coming-out moment – in a woman in prison movie that has a lot more going on than the genre usually can muster up.

 

It was surprising, to me anyway, how many times in how many categories there would be four top-class, world-beating nominees, and then one complete throwaway there to ruin it all. Of these, the most galling was Best Picture ’74, in which the Academy had to hunt way outside of its comfort zone to find The Towering Inferno, just about the only plausible choice that could keep that slate from making this list itself. Happily, Best Director nailed it (in fact, Director is stronger than Picture in all but one or two seasons of the Academy’s 84-year history) with the densest cluster of geniuses ever: Polanski and Cassavetes making their respective masterpieces, Fosse making the best biopic of the decade, and Truffaut having all kinds of fun with cinema’s most delightful and brilliant movie about movies. I wish Coppola had made it in for The Conversation, but that wasn’t going to happen; and when you’re nitpicking over which of Coppola’s two best movies gets the nomination, you’ve run out of things to complain about.