In any category, there are nominees that should win and nominees that win because their movie made a hell of a lot of money. A flick that's both is bulletproof. A win for "Rings" should be more or less automatic, though "A.I." has the more traditional visual-effect-ey sort of shots…robots, flyin' cars, that sorta thing. The only think keeping "Rings" from being a lock is the fact that many of its more eye-popping effects were naturalistic ones.
"Art Direction" requires some deft explanation: it's the difference between an empty soundstage and what you see in the theater and on DVD. If a scene in the film takes place in a shabby assistant-professor's office at MIT, the day that scene is shot there have to be interior walls in there, and maybe a desk, and stuff on the desk, and things on the walls, and electrical outlets in the walls, and things plugged into the electrical outlets. And the type of wallplate on the plug and the sort of pencils on the desk and the title of the book that's on the floor and the fact that it's there on the floor and not on the bookcase are all decisions that have to be deliberately and distinctly made by Art Directors and Set Decorators.
Like Cinematography, it's sort of a cool category to try and evaluate. Let's clear away the rubbish first: "Amélie" - who knows, who cares. "Harry Potter": it's a fantasy film, and as such will probably be disregarded in favor of the bigger, more important, more successful fantasy film. Out.
"Gosford Park": well, that sprawling spectacular manor house is routinely cited as one of the most important and impressive things about the movie. Definitely in with a chance. But I think "Gosford" is going to be seen as a writers' movie. So while I'm not kicking it out, I'm not going to spend much time thinking about this nominee.
"Moulin Rouge" and "Lord Of The Rings" are cut from the same cloth. They're both flicks in which the art director had to create a bizarre and entirely unfamiliar world for the characters to inhabit, though in wholly different ways: "Moulin Rouge" is Elton John's fantasy world while "Rings" is probably…well, I don't know whose fantasy world it is but I bet he's got every episode of "Junkyard Wars" on videotape. If he doesn't, I can lend him one of the DVD's I burned on my dual-processor G4 tower.
I think "Rings" was clearly the bigger challenge. "Moulin Rouge" was a very insular region. A hotel room, a bedroom, a theater interior, a rooftop set. That's not completely it, but the flick definitely didn't have that same sense of a new and startlingly different kingdom around every hillside and every bend in the river.
Still, "Moulin Rouge" just plain screams out for an Art Direction award. I hated the music, I hated the editing, I hated the storyline, but I had to admit that those were some dang ambitious sets. Here's one area in which going way over the top actually works to the movie's benefit.
Okay. Now we've got a category where I can back "Moulin Rouge" 110%.
And what a relief it is. Not because I'm tired of bashing the film ("Imagine
if in 1988, the Coca-Cola Company made a Diet Coke ad that went on for two hours"
featured prominently in my review…and there's plenty more where that came
from, folks) but because this will be the first time in recorded history that
I just intuitively believe that I know who'll win Best Costume Design.
My only consistency in this category has been my annually demonstrating that
I haven't the foggiest idea of what the voters are dialed into when it comes
to costuming. First I bet on the film with the flashiest duds. Then I went for
the one that had the most memorable "signature" outfit. I started
experimenting with some manner of determining which films' clothes were most
important to the story, then I that I had slipped the deadbolt on the doorway
to madness and so from that point on I just asked my goldfish what they
thought and went with it.
Not a hard one. "Beautiful Mind": a handful of old-age makeups, including one that kinda blew. "Moulin Rouge": is that what you remember from that flick? The Makeup?!?