Good afternoon, Commentists! Today I’m cruising on through the more artsy categories today, and here’s a status update: I have three more feature films to watch, and another seven shorts still, and as of tomorrow all of them will be available to me. We’re really doing this! Let’s get into the art of making movies, hey?

PRODUCTION DESIGN

Beauty and the Beast
Blade Runner 2049
Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
The Shape of Water

Congratulations to Academy Awards frequent flyers Katie Spencer and Sarah Greenwood (now six nominations apiece) on each scoring the coveted double nomination here for Beauty and the Beast and Darkest Hour. Of the two, I’ll take the lavish Beauty and the Beast which in addition to being a beautifully crafted movie is a pretty fun one. That said, Darkest Hour‘s dramatic and subtly artistic lighting and authentic period design are nothing to sneeze at.

I appreciate seeing anyone take a stab at the world of the near future, and Blade Runner‘s designers came up with a plausible if highly-stylized vision, gritty and busy and overwhelmingly gloomy. Dunkirk‘s set design, meanwhile, is sparing, even desolate, emphasizing the loneliness and despair of its subjects.

The world that Guillermo del Toro and production designer Paul Austerberry have created in The Shape of Water takes the cake for me, though. The sets are mostly dark but still subtly colorful, and there’s great contrast between the austere, oppressive 50s sci-fi environment of the underground military base and lead character Eliza’s whimsically designed, sparse but welcoming apartment home. And aside from the locations grounded in the real world, the more magical scenes of the film are beautifully realized.

Will Win/Should Win: The Shape of Water.

Upset Special: The deceptively simple-looking Darkest Hour, which has a lot to admire if you’re looking closely.

COSTUME DESIGN

Beauty and the Beast
Darkest Hour
Phantom Thread
The Shape of Water
Victoria & Abdul

Double nominations? Double double nominations. Jacqueline Durran picked up nominations for her costume design in, yep, Beauty and the Beast and Darkest Hour. Beauty and the Beast doesn’t have any one costume as impressive as 2015 live action Disney fairy tale (and Oscar costume nominee) Cinderella‘s ball gown, or probably fifty costumes as impressive as Cinderella‘s top fifty ball gowns, but it’s hard to count  out in a field that’s not the strongest we’ve seen. Darkest Hour does what the Academy likes: Period costumes, and lots of them, although the film’s strong lean toward men’s fashion means there’s not as much variety as you’d usually expect from a film winning on the strength of historical costumes.

And if Darkest Hour does what the Academy likes, Victoria & Abdul does it better, with a panoply of traditional late nineteenth-century courtly costumes, plus some pretty inventive fashions for lead actor Ali Faisal as the royal Munshi, Abdul Karim. I don’t care much for Victoria & Abdul‘s vision of a relatively warm and fuzzy British Empire, which I think is the root of the weird tones the movie tends to strike throughout, but there’s no denying the clothes are on point.

The Shape of Water features a lot of uniforms, and wasn’t really on my radar before the nominations as a movie recognizable for its costumes, but I did enjoy the way designer Luis Sequeira used Sally Hawkins’ wardrobe to add small splashes of color to otherwise dark and drab environments.

Will Win: Phantom Thread. It’s a movie the Academy clearly loves, and it’s a movie about clothes, and while lady snow and I weren’t always convinced of Woodcock’s designs as cutting-edge fashion, there are probably enough fancy outfits here to justify the decision.

Should Win: Victoria & Abdul.

Upset Special: Beauty and the Beast made more money than anything this year ($1.26 billion!), and if the Academy wants to reward that commercial success, this is probably the place for it.

MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING

Darkest Hour
Victoria & Abdul
Wonder

Wonder is a sweet, emotionally intelligent little film that, as my mom put it, every parent with a disabled child ought to see for the sake of their non-disabled children. I suspect it narrowly missed out on an adapted screenplay nod in addition to this makeup nomination. My question is whether there’s enough makeup and hairstyling in this movie to justify the award, and I suspect pretty strongly that there is not. The way the makeup artists have grafted the features of a child with Treacher Collins syndrome onto Jacob Tremblay’s face is impressive, but the next most noteworthy showcase of the team’s talents is… a high school girl with dyed pink hair. Yeah, I don’t know why Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 wasn’t nominated either.

Victoria & Abdul has the edge over both its competitors on hairstyling, but history tells us that’s a second-fiddle discipline when it comes to this award. The makeup crew does deserve full credit for making Judi Dench the spitting image of Queen Victoria, and for thoroughly disguising Eddie Izzard, though of course the absence of makeup does a lot of that work for them.

You might think of Darkest Hour as a one-actor job like Wonder, but while Gary Oldman’s transformation into Winston Churchill is definitely the feature attraction, Darkest Hour also comes with a full complement of period hairstyles and less dramatic but still spot-on facial alterations for the likes of Ben Mendelsohn, Ronald Pickup, and Stephen Dillane.

Will Win/Should Win: Darkest Hour won the top prize from the makeup and hair guild, and the Academy absolutely loves seeing actors made up to look exactly like historical figures.

Upset Special: Victoria & Abdul, if only by process of elimination.

ORIGINAL SONG

“Mighty River” from Mudbound
“Mystery of Love” from Call Me by Your Name
“Remember Me” from Coco
“Stand Up for Something” from Marshall
“This Is Me” from The Greatest Showman

I’ve never been especially good at writing about music, much less actually analyzing it, so I’m going to keep my comments on the actual music pretty brief. But I do want to say something of substance about every nominee, and right now, it’s The Greatest Showman‘s turn. We wouldn’t have been deprived of anything, really, if The Greatest Showman had not been made. A deep dive into P.T. Barnum’s life might have been fascinating, but The Greatest Showman definitely isn’t that movie. It’s not very interesting as a story, and as a musical, the songs are mostly paint-by-numbers pop, catchy in the moment but nothing that’ll stick with you. “This Is Me” is no  exception.

Marshall wasn’t one of my favorites either, which is a shame because I’d also have loved to see a first-rate movie about civil rights attorney and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. The writing is such that at the movie’s climax, Marshall relates his breakthrough realization about the case to his reluctant partner, played by Josh Gad, who tells Marshall he’s a legal genius, and at this point in the movie I was genuinely unable to tell whether Gad was being sarcastic. “Stand Up for Something” has the recognizable but hard-to-pin-down feel of a song written “because we need an end credits song,” a feel I’m sorry to report I also picked up in “Mighty River” despite the overall excellence of Mudbound.

Will Win/Should Win: “Remember Me.” This is a tough one for me, because “Remember Me” is by far the shortest and simplest song on the list. On its own, I don’t think any version of it (and the movie features a few) would deserve the statue. But it’s also far more integral to its movie than any of these other songs; in-universe, it’s the most popular song in the world, and its origins are the primary driver for the movie’s entire plot.

Second Choice: “Mystery of Love.” Call me a hipster if you must for enjoying the Sufjan Stevens entry, but for me this is the best standalone song, and the only one that doesn’t immediately give itself away as having been written specifically for a movie.

ORIGINAL SCORE

Dunkirk
Phantom Thread
The Shape of Water
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Do you guys realize that Hans Zimmer only has one Academy Award? Before I looked it up, I just assumed he had almost as many as John Williams, which is probably mathematically impossible now that I think about it. Zimmer’s Dunkirk score, like many things about Dunkirk, is a triumph of minimalism. It’s brooding, foreboding, unsettling, discordant, with a few pulse-pounding moments, but mostly content to operate at a level below your conscious awareness of it.

Alexandre Desplats’ Shape of Water score is not subtle, but it’s airy, dreamy, a throwback perfectly suited to a big-screen fairy tale romance. Three Billboards is set to a similarly appropriate, western-inflected score from Carter Burwell that connects the film’s grieving mother’s struggle against an uncaring system to the me-against-the-world struggles of old-school film heroes. Jonny Greenwood is the only first-time nominee, and his Phantom Thread soundtrack noticeably fills the spaces in a quiet but often tense movie, seeming to react to events as they take place rather than simply underscore them.  And The Last Jedi… well, it’s Star Wars, man. John Williams’ ability to iterate and build on the themes he first brought to theaters 40 years ago will never stop being impressive, but after eight movies you don’t need me to describe the music of Star Wars to you.

Will Win: The Shape of Water.

Should Win: Dunkirk.

make it snow is an alot of beer who’s seen alot of movies. Pour one out for Jóhann Jóhannsson tonight.