I know this is no secret, but listen up anyway: I absolutely love part 3 in this series. It's my favorite to write every year! Talking about my favorite movies is great, and talking about my favorite screenplays is a thing that has to happen, contractually, but they all pale in comparison to spending a few hours in a dizzy haze, dreaming about lighting rigs and creature prosthetics and innovative sound effects. And this isn't just something I do today, incidentally. My family can attest to the fact that I've gone on at least three different rants about why the lighting choices alone on my favorite Spanish soap opera qualify it to be considered high art, right next to James Joyce and Fergie. Point is, I love these things year round, and how could you not? None of the movies you love can exist without the craftspeople working to make them a reality. All the moments that make you feel something build whatever power they have on the aesthetic choices that are made and created to support them. So let's go on a goddamn cinematic journey.
In interest of putting a face on some of these things, I've added some visuals to the lists. They should enlarge when you click on them, but I make no promises, as my technical skills are less than garbage.
Note: I didn't include pictures or videos for film editing or the sound categories, because I don't really know how to capture film editing compellingly in a way that doesn't waste either my time or yours, and I don't have the resources to make audio clips for the sound categories (which I would love to do--particularly this year, since the Academy tossed out sound editing, my favorite category, the absolute monsters).
Production Design
5. Love and Monsters-where's it say that apocalypses can't be scary and twee at the same time? Seaside cave havens, rotted townscapes juxtaposing the better homes and bunkers underground, and a bevy of wacky mutant bugs.
4. First Cow-hard-won domesticity wrung from a stone and shaped into little things like wooden spatulas, drying racks, and rough-spun glass, surrounded by precarious stacked logs to to keep out the chill.
3. Mank-all the glamorous places where the rich go to die. Hearst's labyrinth estate is the obvious stand-out, or maybe the immaculate chaos of Mank's desert retreat, but I love the scenes filmed on movie sets (...in-film movie sets) best.
2. News of the World-19th century Texas drawn as though from the nightmares of another dimension. The entire world feels empty--even the interiors defined by their open expanses--as the little frontier towns cling to the surface of the earth like they'll fall into the sky at any moment.
1. Promising Young Woman-the most malevolent synergy of production design and framing I've seen all year (or in any recent year). Every space designed like a sick joke, a sentient, carnivorous thing looking to swallow characters whole after telling them exactly who they are. The series of bedrooms near the beginning are particularly telling, each given a second to define each male character/attempted abuser's life in a heartbeat. The overstuffed, desperate chintz of the Mulligan's/her parents' house is also memorable, as is the film's final major setting.
Honorable mention: brutal futuristic spaces to mutilate people inside in Possessor
Costume Design
5. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga-somehow functions as a massive and silly parody of a Eurovision contest as well as a plausible collection of Eurovision outfits. Additional points to how much attention is paid to the nonperformance affair: think Ferrell and McAdams' collection of horrifying but comfy jumpers, McAdams' wild shiny plastic (?) dress she wears to the party, or Dan Stevens' plunging necklines.
4. Birds of Prey-high trash chic, from Harley's plastic, see-through jacket to Chris Messina and Ewan McGregor's vaguely lurid suits that look like they've been tailored with a hunting knife.
3. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar-impeccable, life-saving culottes, color palettes that look like they came from a mid-80s catalogue of innovate jello meals (cream of mushroom and sangria jello! mayonnaise and dragonfruit jello! Wear it on your chest forever!), and Hawaiian shirts that look like they know a secret. They're the funniest costumes of the year, but I would also like to own each and every one of them.
2. Ammonite-dresses like prisons, or prisons like dresses, that flip on their head when touched by a little light. Ronan's character gets the best outfits, tracing the micro-fluctuations of her mood while serving a huge, finely textured look on their own. Special shout-out to Kate Winslet's formal party dress, perfectly shaped to fit a person who gets ready for a party preparing to have a bad time but hoping not to. Really gorgeous work across the board.
1. Emma.-While, on the surface, I might seem to be caving to my worst impulses, giving the top spot to the heavily costumed period romance like any other awards body, no movie contains looks so lavish, character-defining, and bonkers as this movie. The women drift from room to room like precarious, architectural birds, borne on the updrafts conjured by their own trains and frills. And the men do the exact same thing! Every single outfit in this movie boggled my mind, and there are hundreds of them. (Seriously, investigate the source down there, which has a spectacular collection of just one character's wardrobe.)
Honorable mention: sExY drag and spider skirts in Promising Young Woman
Visual Effects
5. The Invisible Man-effects defined by exclusion; a minimalist take on drawing the audience's attention to what might be in the room, what shouldn't be, and what is anyway.
4. Birds of Prey-over the top fluorescent wackiness, friendly pet hyenas, and a Gotham that gets that you don't have to be dead-eyed to be good.
3. Possessor-difficult to capture this achievement in an image or a sentence, as the focus was on in-camera effects that suggest hallucinations. Back-projected images, strings of fragmented hallucinations (all done in camera!), stomach-churning interactions of bodies and technology.
2. Tenet-speaking of in-camera! Tenet (allegedly) only has about 300 VFX shots, less than most movies of any genre. I don't love Christopher Nolan movies, and I think Tenet is pretty mediocre, even by his standards, but I can respect the monumental effort that went in to making this movie almost entirely with practical effects.
1. Welcome to Chechnya-the year's most vital and unsettling effects, in which the faces of gay/queer Chechen victims of the region's state-sanctioned violence are digitally masked to protect their identity. The result is both emotionally resonant (we see these people's eyes and emotions in a way that we couldn't with a simple face-blur or speaking in a dark room) and unsettling (any moment where they don't look 100% like natural human faces only underlines the self-effacement and state-forced erasure these people now experience).
(There's no good gif or image that really shows the impact of the work, but this scene that I posted as one of the best of the year gets the point across.)
Honorable mention: I can't turn down spooky sea beasts, and Underwater delivers just that
Makeup and Hairstyling
5. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom-period makeup, body transformations, and character details that seem both stylized and realistic.
4. Relic-rotted black mold brush dragged across your back. Very subtle, quiet work until it suddenly becomes anything but. Relic has one of the best endings of the year, and it only lands as hard as it does because of the deeply upsetting makeup work on display.
3. Emma.-for elaborate styles as far-flung and labored as the clothes. I don't know if 19th century British aristocracy actually spent hours festooning their hair into fancy proto-spaghetti, but I can't imagine anything else.
2. Birds of Prey-for Harley Quinn's newer, more carefree look (less Stockholm Syndrome, more Ann Taylor on mushrooms), for the Messina's grisly body mods, for Ewan McGregor's all-business coiffe, and for Mary Elizabeth Winstead's 'I stopped watching TV in the early 90s, and I assume nothing has changed since then) biker do. I see you, girl.
1. Possessor-simply put, for being so gross that I wanted it to stop. Expressive geysers of viscera, melting bodies and faces, and one of the simplest but most unnerving images of the year (below).
Film Editing
5. The Invisible Man-has the bravery (and gall) to force its audience to just stare for a while. Exceptionally tense and cruel construction and pacing, massive moments coming from nowhere and throwing themselves into our laps.
4. Lingua Franca-like The Invisible Man, an exceptionally patient movie, and one whose editing has similar goals of expressing the unbearable tension of being a person in a room.
3. Sound of Metal-moves forward as though it has to cut time with glass. Smart juxtapositions, momentum that rests like a snake before writhing forward.
2. Time-moments on moments on moments, the idea of linear time crushed into something less meaningless. A massive feat of shaping archival footage into something new.
1. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets-similarly, this documentary sifts through untold hours of footage to fashion something new. A movie that is born and dies in the editing room--before firing up the editing suite, the filmmakers had dozens (or hundreds) of hours of drunken conversations, and nothing else. An act of creation and recreation.
Honorable mention: I don't love this movie at all, but I figure abut 90% of the reason people are responding to The Trial of the Chicago 7 is how propulsive it manages to feel, so a big shout-out to the editor for building the illusion.
Cinematography
5. Judas and the Black Messiah-lit as if the world were laminated and then held up to a forest fire. Sharp and muted, with a kinetic camera.
4. Mank-vacillates wildly between mostly period-accurate and looking like film noir had a love-child with 90s indie movies and then pushed that love child out of a plane. I think it's a good thing?
3. Nomadland-one of year's most expressive and lush films, conjuring gold fantasias from van interiors, empty fields, and roadside diners.
2. First Cow-shoots the Pacific Northwest as a fairytale dystopia, all children peering out of pitch-black interiors into an unwelcoming light.
1. Vitalina Varela-one of the most visually striking movies I've ever seen, and one whose merits have yet to be caught in what's available on google images. Maybe the darkest movie I've ever seen--just about every scene takes place in almost complete darkness, forcing the audience to spend the whole movie leaning forward, scanning the frame for just a bit of light. The result is a series of stunning, frustrating images, a descriptor that fits the titular character as well as the film itself.
Honorable mention: Tenet, dumb but pretty
Original Score
5. Judas and the Black Messiah-a knotted morass of nerves, suspicion and guilt, as written by aggressive percussion and a truly bizarre horn section.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGpuqSfCQCY
4. The Vast of Night-music like a whisper, until it builds like thunder. Delicate and a little outrageous.
(Note that this link has huge spoilers for the end of the movie, but this soundtrack is barely on youtube, and for some reason one of only two tracks also has the movie's ending playing.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2WeM7x4DdE
3. The Invisible Man-sounds as though someone took the sound you make right before you throw up and stretched it far too long. Extremely tense and upsetting work, doing a lot of the heavy lifting to maintain the atmosphere and unease that the film needs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws6IcI0Sqls
2. Tenet-music for a rave at the end of the world. Tenet is something of a lumbering beast, shambling from plot point to plot point, but Ludwig Göransson's music is the caretaker pulling it forward. What a fun, squirrelly work this soundtrack is--most of my enjoyment of the movie itself came because I got to just sit there and vibe to the music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yywzQbZcDL0
1. Soul-somewhat cliché to name this as the best of the year, but sometimes I'm a cliché too, and sometimes clichés work. Soul's musicscape is a singular achievement, using Jon Batiste's jazz compositions when characters are on Earth, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's pieces (living somewhere between The Social Network and Ludovico Einaudi) when they're elsewhere. Both halves of the score are worthy of the top in their own right, but the fact that both coexist and interact as well as they do within the same film is another thing entirely.
(two pieces: the first from Jon Baptiste's jazz score:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBWZN7Ju9pU
and the second from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNXY1av-NUE)
Honorable mention: Wild Mountain Thyme's fittingly old-fashioned score
Sound Mixing
5. First Cow-makes the not-silence of the forest both toxic and welcoming, depending on the minute. Extra points for the lived-in sounds of the camps and the tenterhooks nighttime sequences.
4. La Llorona-the loudest quiet movie of the year, or maybe the quietest loud movie. The past and present collide as sonic presences; the world is only quiet when someone is dying.
3. Mank-a canny mix designed to sound like films of the 40s, and succeeds. The way the film keeps a multitude of balls in there during moments of studio hubbub and captures the posh gone-here-to-die howl of the writing retreat both impress.
2. The Invisible Man-I've already written at length about this movie is one long straight razor scraped against a ragged nerve, and the sound is no exception. As what we see is meaningless, the film turns on a dime-sized fulcrum of what we can hear, throwing the audience from room to room, playing them like a particularly nervous piano.
1. Sound of Metal-there's no question about what goes at the top here--the way Sound of Metal uses sound to evoke space and experience is unparalleled this year. By interweaving audio tracks from a hearing perspective, the main character's muted experience, the sound of the world through aids, etc., Sound of Metal renders the world as a prism of sound, one in which peace is only available in stillness.
Honorable mention: video game chaos and impromptu band shenanigans in We Are Little Zombies
Sound Editing
5. Possessor-for the industrial-strength splat!s of the blood geysers alone, but also for the determined hum of the machines, the cyclone hallucination sounds, and icepick melodies of all those stab wounds.
4. We Are Little Zombies-beeps, boops, zaps, flying jellyfish, 8-bit carnage and catharsis.
3. Love and Monsters-for the curious, stentorian grumbles of the monsters, the otherworldly sonic similarity of the new world to our old one, robots whose movements sound vaguely nostalgic, and the miniature tink! of a spear trying to kill a crab and failing.
2. Birds of Prey-funhouse hammer bops, overblown firework explosions, and gun battles like overexcited popcorn.
1. Sound of Metal-big copy/paste from the sound mixing category: what Sound of Metal does is revelatory, and deserves all the accolades it can get.
Honorable mention: fun and learning with Cthulu in Underwater
Original Song
5. "Brand New Story"-Ride Your Wave-a bubblegum-pink pop ballad that will have you cheering or getting weepy, depending on the moment. Because of how it's used in the plot, I cannot imagine anyone leaving this film not singing 'ki mi KA' as they exit the (...virtual) theater.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFSLmGI7heg
4. "Io si"-The Life Ahead-look, I am a sucker for Diane Warren power ballads, just like the rest of the world. I can't help it. I had this song listed at like...14th place twenty minutes ago, and now here we are. I can't fight it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imjSm7FNmwE
3. "Edgar's Prayer"-Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar-it's such a bummer that I can't share this whole scene with you, as it's one of the great moments of cinematic silliness, but this'll have to do. This isn't even a musical! Jamie Dornan just turns to the camera and starts singing about how he's gonna spin himself into the ground like a baby ballerina! This movie is a masterpiece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCe4votU-8A
2. "Your Name Engraved Herein"-Your Name Engraved Herein-comes as a real gut-punch in the context of the narrative, and then comes again as a *second* gut-punch as the slow, gentle version plays over the last moments of the movie. A great example of using a song as a narrative point to stellar effect, and the song itself is lovely as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PThAcbA8z6I
1. "Husavik"-Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga-there are just far too many things that I can't resist. A massive power ballad! Silly, wonderful costumes! Rachel McAdams! The movie's conflict being solved by a Talent Show (basically)! A dramatic switch to Icelandic! And only one thing I don't (what is the half-life of a Will Ferrell, and when is it safe to put him in the side of a mountain forever?)! Be still my heart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjuphuG3ndw
Honorable mention: Leslie Odom Jr.'s impassioned "Speak Now" from One Night in Miami
And that's for year-end lists, if you can believe it (and I definitely can, since my hands feel like they are made of butter and tears). You're not done with me yet, as I'll be posting Oscar predictions tomorrow, and nomination reactions the day after (it's a busy time for this blog, so get ready to shelter in place), but that's it for the lists! They've taken plenty out of me this year, but I'm glad, as always, that I made the time and energy to do it.
For those playing along at home, these were the movies that showed up most frequently on the lists:
Sound of Metal-8
First Cow-6
Minari-6
Nomadland-5
The Invisible Man-5
As for wins, Sound of Metal was the only movie to win more than one category, winning five (Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, Sound Mixing, and Sound Editing).
So that's that! As always, thanks so much for reading (if you are, and even if you haven't!). I very much appreciate it.
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