We all know who Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts are, not to mention older Hollywood names like Nicholson and Streep and DeNiro. And movie buffs can name a few directors and possibly even a writer or two.
But how many people know what Oscar nominee Conrad L. Hall does for a living? (He’s one of the town’s legendary cinematographers, winner of the 1969 Oscar for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”; this year he’s the frontrunner for his work on “American Beauty.”) How many know the occupation of Jenny Bevan or Luciana Arrighi? (They’re costume designer and art director, respectively, nominated this year for “Anna and the King”).
When do the gaffers, grips, best boys and assistants to Cruise and Nicole Kidman get their day in the Oscar sun anyway?
All these people are part of that vast army of technicians and creative folks who toil behind the cinema scenes –and whose names are mostly unknown to casual moviegoers or are so buried in the endless credit crawls that they’re literally lost in the dark.
But they’re important. They matter. How would “Citizen Kane” have been without cinematographer Gregg Toland? Or Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and “Vertigo” without composer Bernard Hermann? Or “Gone With the Wind” without art director William Cameron Menzies?
The subsidiary awards don’t merely fill out an Oscar evening. The “secondary” awards pay tribute to the fact that movies are perhaps the most collaborative of all art forms, that many different people and minds contribute to the total effect, that many talented cogs make up the grand machine.
So here is inside stuff on some of the “outside” awards. But nothing for best boys and gaffers, unfortunately. What they obviously need is their own awards show.
Cinematography
At any given Oscar show, the cinematography awards are likely to be the most deserving, mostly because the evidence is always on the screen. In the earlier big studio days, the voters showed a weakness for glossy black and white and gaudy Technicolor. But in the 1970s, Hollywood photography began to get heavy influence from the great international innovators, including Vittorio Storaro of Italy (“Apocalypse Now”), Sweden’s Sven Nykvist (“Cries and Whispers”) and Nestor Almendros of Cuba and France (“Days of Heaven”). There were also younger, more radical Americans like Hall, Haskell Wexler (“Bound for Glory”), Vilmos Szigmond (“Deliverance”) and Gordon Willis (the “Godfather” trilogy).These cinematographers and others took color photography, moving camerawork, the use of color filters and “magic hour” effects to new heights.
Voters, however, sometimes confuse the effects of the production designer with those of the cinematographer; they’ve also often shown a weakness for outdoor photography. When he accepted his 1985 Oscar for “Out of Africa,” Peter Watkin felt compelled to inform the audience that not he but the second unit photographers were responsible for the jungle scenes they so admired.
This year’s likely winner is Hall, for the popularity of “American Beauty” and the inventiveness of its visuals, and for the general reverence in which he is held by the entire Academy.
A note: The cinematographer is usually responsible for the lighting of the image and not its composition, which is part of the director’s staging responsibilities. But some cinematographers, like Haskell Wexler, claim they do all the framing — which may be why John Sayles’ films shot by Wexler (“The Secret of Roan Inish”) look so much better than Sayles’ others.
Editing
There are, traditionally, two kinds of editing: the classic “invisible” editing favored by Golden Era studio directors like John Ford or Howard Hawks and the flashier, more obvious styles that came into vogue during the swinging ’60s but really date back to the ’20s and the films of Sergei Eisenstein (“Potemkin”). Academy voters have tended to prefer highly visible editing. Michael Kahn, who has edited Steven Spielberg’s movies ever since “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” is widely considered to be Spielberg’s secret weapon.
This year’s winners of Editors Guild “Eddie” were “Being John Malkovich” (not nominated for an Oscar) and “The Matrix,” which has some the gaudiest editing imaginable–probably because it’s a Philip Dick-like story moving in and out of various levels of reality.
Documentary
For many years, the documentary awards were the Academy’s most controversial. The documentary committee, a notoriously opinionated group, acted as a law unto themselves and an execution squad for non-fiction films, like “Hoop Dreams,” “The Thin Blue Line” or “Roger and Me,” that won an outside reputation. The documentary selection group famously turned their screenings into Gong Shows with members waving flashlights to signal their dislike of a movie, which could be stopped by a majority midway. (Both “The Thin Blue Line” and “Crumb” were gonged, or flashlighted, by the committee.)
Members would argue that it was wrong to send a film like “Hoop Dreams” to the full Academy because it would probably win, beating out more obscure, worthier, more politically correct films. The sheer arrogance of the committee was confounding; the voters actually included documentary filmmakers whose movies were nominated and one documentary distributor who often picked up nominated films for his company.
After the “Hoop Dreams” fiasco, the documentary committee was reformed to restrain its excesses and give more working filmmakers a vote. But left-wing or socially conscious documentaries still have a huge advantage, which gives an edge this year to Oscar-savvy producer Arthur Cohn’s “One Day in September.”
Production designand art direction
Production designers are often confused with art directors, though, these days, the former outrank the latter. The production designer is the person responsible for the movie’s overall look: its decor and settings, costumes and visual and special effects. The art director, who used to have the overall power of the production designer, now works under him, as do the costume designer and set decorator.
Strangely, the Academy still gives its main design award to the art directors (together with the set decorator) and has never bothered to add a production design Oscar. (Several years ago, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association tried to help right this wrong by giving out prizes to production designers.)
Lush period pictures almost always win the art direction prize; “Sleepy Hollow” (Rick Heinrichs) is the current favorite.
Visual effects, soundand sound effects editing
The sound mixer is responsible for all matters pertaining to sound on the set, especially the recording of the dialogue. The sound effects editor is responsible for the final dialogue track and adding all post-dubbed speeches or sounds. Nowadays, movie soundtracks are so layered with ambient sound that, by comparison, older movies tend to sound too quiet.
These awards, along with the visual effects Oscar (for special and digital effects), almost always go to the big action of science fiction blockbusters like the “Star Wars” or “Terminator” series, which rarely get awards in other categories. This year, “The Matrix” and “Star Wars: Episode One–The Phantom Menace” slug it out in all three categories.
