Dracula Presents: The Twelfth Annual Golden Stake Awards

Best Sound Design
I always dread this category because it’s frankly looking at something I don’t feel overly qualified to judge and isn’t something I’m paying a whole lot of attention to through the year. The category is a mix of editing and mixing and… let’s just get this over with.

Avengers: Infinity War: This year I’ve tried to avoid simply nominating the five loudest blockbusters I could find but I did feel there should be one movie nominated for sheer audio bombast and this year that meant a nomination for the latest Avengers movie. Like with all of the Avengers movies this film had the challenge of taking each unique audio challenge from all of these Marvel films and make them all interact properly.

A Quiet Place: This would be a situation where the absence of sound in certain places draws a lot of extra attention to the sound that is there. For example, a big part of the plot is that the characters need to carefully make sure their footsteps aren’t too loud, so the audience will actually be paying attention to make sure they’ve included custom footsteps for every surface. There are other challenges as well, like constructing how the world sounds through the daughter’s hearing aid as well as your typical horror movie monster sounds.

Roma: Perhaps one of the most unfortunate things about Roma having been financed by Netflix is that a lot of its audiences may well have heard its soundscape for the first time through small TV speakers. The people who got the full theatrical experience learned that this has a much more active surround trach than you would normally expect from a realist drama like this. Curaron really tries to immerse you in the lives of these people and recreate every last sound in their lives.

A Star is Born: A Star is Born is mostly nominated here because its musical performances were apparently recorded live rather than overdubbed in an ADR studio. So, the people recording this needed to get the perfect mix of the performers vocals as well as their instruments and the crowd noises while keeping everything clear. That doesn’t seem like it would be an easy thing to do. On top of that the film just generally mixes the music really well and the who movie sounds good.

Upgrade: This little B-movie action film from Blumhouse probably doesn’t have the most technologically sophisticated sound technology behind it but it does have a couple of tricks up its sleeve that stood out to me. For one thing the film adds this almost robotic sound effect to the main character’s movements every time STEM takes over the protagonist’s body. Secondly the film has this neat way of making STEM’s voice really stand out in the soundscape whenever he speaks to the main character in his head.

And the Golden Stake Goes To…

Sound editors record and assemble sound effects while sound mixers bring them together in an overall sound mix and assign surround elements.

I'd probably go with Quiet Place as well.

Cool. So now that you've educated me, the choice still seems the best one.

Best Art Direction
Art direction refers to the various design elements of a film, specifically the sets, but in my take on the category that also includes specialized props and to some extent costumes. Basically any film that uses practical and design elements to build a world and make it feel real and lived in.

Annihilation: Though a lot of Annihilation is set outdoors it still manages to do some really striking things in set decoration at various turns. Primarily set inside of “The Shimmer,” a sort of cordoned off area being effected by an alien phenomenon that distorts and reflects organisms on a DNA level, the film shows a lot of places where plant life is altered and the remains of previous explorer are splashed all over the walls of abandoned buildings in a sort of mutated form reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing. The real standout set is of course the lighthouse, where the final confrontation with the alien(s) occurs, which looks great simply as a building and is also interestingly altered by The Shimmer all over the walls.

Bad Times at the El Royale: Bad Times at the El Royale isn’t strictly a one location movie but it is primarily set within the confines and immediate outskirts of its titular hotel so the pressure was on to make that hotel look interesting. The hotel itself is defined by the fact that it sits on both sides of the California/Nevada border, a fact that has no real effect on the story except to give the set designers a motif to build the hotel’s décor around, and it allows them to add some neat touches like the keychains that depict both states depending on where the guests are staying. On top of that the film gets the hotel’s art deco look right and also makes the hotel look appropriately run down.

Black Panther: “Afrofuturism” is a term that was coined in 1994 to describe a form of multimedia speculative fiction that long pre-dated the coinage of its name and uses futuristic concepts and images within the context of the culture of the African diaspora. It’s something that’s popped up a lot in music and literature but the Wakanda of Black Panther is the first time that Afrofuturism has really been brought to the big screen, at least on this scale. The way the film builds a futuristic city using African cultural elements is unlike anything that had been done previously and was something of a revelation.

Cold War: Cold War had a pretty clear mission: recreate Europe during the middle of the twentieth century but it needed to do it in a very detailed way which captures certain ideas in a very quick way. The film is set in a number of places from Poland to East Berlin to Italy to Paris and the film’s sets and location scouts need to capture the mood and feel of all of these places without really having a whole lot of time to do so. Perhaps most striking are its glimpses of the propaganda filled coldness of the east side of the iron curtain, but it also makes the nightclubs and recording studios of the west side feel appropriately cool.

A Quiet Place: A Quite Place is at heart a post-apocalyptic movie that’s built around people needing to build a home that’s devoid of sound and that gives the set decorators a chance to come up with all sorts of clever touches that these survivors may have come up with. For example, we see people spreading sand along the ground to accommodate barefoot walking and creaky floorboards are marked in order to keep people from stepping on them. There are other little touches you can observe as well like the fact that the only thing that hasn’t been looted from a local convenience store are the potato chips.

And the Golden Stake Goes To…

Wow. I would have assumed Annihilation or Beale Street.

Annihilation is well worthy of its nom I don't remember or haven't seen the rest.

Need to speed up on this

Best Soundtrack

The title is a bit misleading but the “Best Soundtrack” category is meant to be for the best use of pre-existing source music throughout a movie. It is NOT meant to have anything to do with what the music is like in the format of an album and it is NOT meant to cover soundtracks like Black Panther, A Star is Born, or Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse which primarily consists of music that was newly recorded for the movie.

Bad Times At the El Royale: Bad Times at the El Royale is a movie set in 1969 and there are a lot of clichéd directions you could go with a soundtrack to a movie with a setting like that but Drew Goddard clearly did his homework and found ways to soundtrack the movie without dipping into the usual pile of “60s greatest hits.” About the only obvious choices here are Deep Purple’s “Hush” and maybe “Bend Me, Shape Me” by The American Breed, the rest are more obscure songs from the era witch fit well with the film’s Southwest art deco trappings.

Crazy Rich Asians: I wouldn’t say that the Crazy Rich Asians soundtrack is the most diverse set of music but it did have one central idea that stood out. To create the soundtrack Jon Chu looked up a list of songs about money and found Chinese cover versions of those songs. While they never quite found a place in the movie for the Chinese version of Gold Digger that they found they were able to find places for Chinese covers of “Money (That’s What I Want)” and “Material Girl.” There’s also a Chinese cover of Coldplay’s “Yellow” and a handful of other non-cover Chinese songs to round things out.

Deadpool 2: The Deadpool movies have a knack for making soundtrack selections sarcastically. They’ll make some almost embarrassingly on the nose selections like choosing AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” for a pre-mission pump up song or playing Pat Benatar’s “We Belong” during a finale where a crew is brought together but doing it in a winking way that suggests that it’s really parodying the kind of movies that would make these choices in earnest. At other points it just picks overwrought songs to play during kind of silly scenes like when Enya’s “Only Time” is used when the convoy crashes over the overpass, and at other points it calls attention to what it’s doing in dialogue like in the fight scenes where Skrilex’s Bangarang is playing. Snarky as this all is, the joke song choices do generally still have a way of working in the scenes.

The Hate U Give: Where most soundtracks are notable for the way they assemble music from previous decades, the soundtrack for The Hate U Give is notable for the way it captures the music of the now. It includes some 2010s mainstream hip hop staples like Travis Scott’s “Goosebumps,” Logic’s “Everybody,” and Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA” as well as some less popular songs like Pusha T’s “Hold On” and 21 Savage’s “Ghostface Killers.” Also, given that the film’s title derives from Tupac’s notion of T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E. it of course includes some of Pac’s songs like “Keep Your Head Up” and “Only God Can Judge Me.”

Ready Player One: Ready Player One is of course a hash of 1980s pop culture references and its soundtrack is part of this as well. This is established right away when the film opens on the synthesizer riff of Van Halen’s “Jump” and continues through the rest of the film. The film features other 80s classics like Tears For Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and Blondie’s “One Way or Another” as well as some slightly less obvious hits like New Order’s “Blue Monday” and Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams.” The soundtrack generally has a way of picking some pretty ubiquitous hits without being exactly the “totally 80s” songs that might jump to your head right away.

And the Golden Stake Goes To…

Someone's gotta do one of these for tv shows.

Are we doing top ten list this year? Finally have seen basically everything so I'm ready.

Yeah, soundtracks were bad this year. I mostly viewed Isle of Dogs in terms of the Desplat score, which had a harder time in a much tougher field.

I think you made the right choice. Although I'm a bit surprised BlacKkKlansman didn't get a nod. Not only does it have a sort of buddy cop energy, but also scenes like the Belafonte section or the ending, which are really well-cut.