Straight White Male Super Bowl 2016: The Oscar Nominees for Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Visual Effects

The Oscars are almost upon us, with all their unpredictability. You don’t need an oracle to tell you what will happen. You don’t even need a film critic. You need someone who sees into the very souls of the Academy voters. You need a Straight White Man.

Welcome back. This is going to be by far my worst piece on this year’s Oscar nominees, because I don’t have even the flimsiest of qualifications for judging it. I think I have at least some capacity to spot good writing, to gauge whether an actor’s performance is convincing, even to appreciate a beautiful shot or general approach to shooting. But I don’t know shit about the technical side of producing sounds or mixing them or creating digital effects, and when something in these categories is done well in a subtle way, I’m probably not even going to notice it. Basically, I’ll be able to tell you what movies have the most sound editing or the most visual effects, but best? Eh.

Why listen to me at all, then? Well, remember: I’m a Straight White Man. And I have at least watched all these movies. You won’t get that kind of dedication from your average Academy voter.

Before I continue, a quick programming note: I’m hoping to have illustrations for the remaining posts!

SOUND EDITING

Mad Max: Fury Road – As I see it, in sound editing, you’re mostly doing one of two things: You’re making things that are already real sound like they should, or you’re inventing sounds for things that aren’t real yet to make. Despite being basically a science fiction movie, Mad Max is also mostly a movie about cars and guns and explosions, all of which exist in pretty much the same form in real life as they do in the movie, and so Mad Max mostly does the first thing. It does it well, too! The cars sound powerful and muscular, and the explosions feel like they’ve got some real force behind them.

The Martian – The thing that struck me about the sound in The Martian was the way it lends urgency to everything that happens to Astronaut Matt Damon on Mars. The battering windstorms, the air hissing out of his suit through a crack in the visor, it’s all genuinely scary and it ratchets up the tension, reminding you how little separates him from death at all times. The Martian doesn’t work if you forget about the stakes, or if it has to keep using dialogue to hammer them home.

The Revenant – This is, once again, a movie that depends heavily on making you feel its characters’ pain and uses every available tool, including sound, for the job. Near misses with gunshots and arrows whiz by threateningly; hits land with visceral wet thuds. The bear sounds real, and really, really pissed. That’s the one thing in this category I do have a real point of reference for, because one of the cats that lives in my house thinks she’s a bear.

Sicario – I’m not going to get to be the first to call Sicario the Drug War’s Zero Dark Thirty, just like I wasn’t the first to say The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared was Sweden’s Forrest Gump, even though I swear I thought of both comparisons on my own. Sicario‘s a smart and carefully crafted thriller that could easily have been nominated for two or three more awards than it was, but this sort of movie isn’t really in the Academy’s wheelhouse, and Sicario doesn’t have a great hook like being about the killing of the guy who did 9/11. Sound-wise, there’s a lot to like here. Without giving too much away, one early scene stands out as really bringing home the disorienting effect of a nearby explosion. Like The Revenant, Sicario excels at making you feel the action through sound. If you haven’t seen this one yet, let me recommend a double feature with Oscar-nominated documentary Cartel Land, currently streaming on Netflix. By the time it’s over, you’ll hate everyone.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens – Here we are at the “making all the sounds up” end of my imaginary sound editing spectrum. Is it weird if I don’t have much to say about Star Wars from a critical perspective? I really didn’t watch it with an eye on how it would perform during awards season. A lot of the groundwork for how things should sound in Star Wars has, of course, already been laid, and I thought the movie did a good job of sticking to its roots.

Will/Should Win: The Revenant.

Second Choice/Upset Special: The Martian, as far as I’m concerned. This is a strong category top to bottom, though, and nothing would really surprise me.

SOUND MIXING

Bridge of Spies – To my ear there’s not really anything extraordinary here. The movie does a couple of neat things with crowds, first in a scene on the New York subway and later as the Berlin Wall is being constructed, but a movie that largely consists of Tom Hanks having conversations with people indoors doesn’t offer quite the same challenges as some of these other nominees.

Mad Max: Fury Road – For most of Mad Max‘s nearly uninterrupted two-hour car chase, everything is loud, which makes it all the more impressive that nothing is too loud. You’ve got all these characters crammed into a turbocharged truck-and-trailer rig that may be using an actual jet engine for propulsion, but when they have something to say, you always know what they’re saying. It’s the polar opposite of last year’s inexplicable sound mixing nominee Interstellar, in which I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying any of the time.

The Martian – I’m sorry, guys, but it’s been longer since I’ve seen The Martian than any of these other movies. The details of the movie’s sound balance are, at least for now, lost to me.

The Revenant – The Revenant practically wins this award in its very first scene, which tracks a couple of hunters through a cold marsh. You hear the trickling water, the splashes of their footsteps the wildlife all around—it’s really something special to listen to. This is one of the things The Revenant keeps doing so brilliantly throughout, making its world feel lush and alive and also making it totally plausible that Leo DiCaprio didn’t hear that enormous bear rolling up on him.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens – Lots and lots of busy scenes in this movie, which is both very Star Wars and very JJ-Abrams-doing-sci-fi. I don’t think any film on this list had this sort of variety of high-activity scenes—a First Order raid! a crowded cantina! a chaotic air-and-ground battle!—but the dialogue and sound in every one of them seemed ably balanced.

Will/Should Win: The Revenant.

Second Choice: Mad Max. 

Upset Special: Bridge of Spies, somehow.

VISUAL EFFECTS

Ex Machina – Most of the effects work in Ex Machina goes to transforming Alicia Vikander into the android Ava, who’s at her least human-looking early on in the movie. I could try to describe this, but I wouldn’t do it justice; you may as well just see for yourself. Cool, right? Evocative of some of the case mods you see from hardcore PC enthusiasts, which I think ties in nicely with the movie’s themes of creation, ownership, and personhood. Without giving too much away, Ava’s android body serves as a palette that the movie adds to and subtracts from in interesting ways as the plot progress.

Mad Max – Fury Road – Miller’s extensive use of practical effects where other directors would opt for digital ones pays off in a movie where everything has weight and looks undeniably real. Okay, maybe the fire tornado requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, but I think it says a lot about Miller’s commitment to realism that even in that scene, he shot the real vehicles rather than slap the entire thing together in a computer. Now, I don’t want to take this angle too far. When Mad Max first hit theaters, I remember a lot of breathless talk about how Miller had almost completely eschewed digital effects, and that’s not true. But the things that are computer-generated—landscapes and crowds, especially—are also beautifully realized and realistic down to the minutest detail; I’d never have known, just from watching, how much of the terrain in the movie simply doesn’t exist.

The Martian – I’m not sure why I don’t think of this one as more of a standout. It may just be that it’s been the longest since I saw it; obviously I know that it takes place on Mars and involves a lot of space travel and therefore must have required a small army of effects artists. I certainly don’t remember seeing one thing that looked hokey or wrong or out of place. I suspect what’s going on here is that I was too intent on the human drama to care so much about how the movie looked. And that’s very good for The Martian, which is a great, compelling movie! But it’s bad for The Martian in this category.

The Revenant – Years from now, we may look back on this as the film and the rumors surrounding it as the moment a generation of Bear Rights Activists found their purpose. For those of you that haven’t seen it, I’m pleased to announce that I can clear the bear of all wrongdoing. Yeah, there’s that one camera angle that looks pretty bad, but here’s the thing: It’s a female bear. It is not raping Leo from that position. It is also a marvel of effects work, thoroughly mauling Leo over the course of a single six- or seven-minute shot that feels at least twice as long.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens – I think it says a lot about the evolution of visual and sound effects in movies that the new Star Wars, of all things, feels to me like it so clearly lags in all three of these categories. I remember, or at least imagine that I remember, a time when sci-fi movies with no shot at the top prizes (looking at you, The Phantom Menace) could be assured of nominations and even wins for their effects. Now even the prestige pictures have amazing CG. Star Wars, it seems, is still the betting favorite in this category, but I don’t know. Maybe the wide-open creativity it showed off just doesn’t appeal to me as much as what these other films were able to do within their particular boxes. Maybe I just thought the rathtar was silly and unnecessary.

Will/Should Win: Mad Max: Fury Road, or I riot.

Second Choice: I riot.

Upset Special: The Revenant. The bear really is a big deal, and thanks to Matt Drudge’s scurrilous rumors it got a whole lot of buzz. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Revenant is top-of-mind for a lot of Academy voters right now.