Dracula Presents: The Thirteenth Annual Golden Stake Awards

The only of the nominees I haven't seen, but probably the right choice.

I'm going to hit the accelerator on this.

Best Sound Design
I really wish I hadn’t created this as a category when I started this, I’ve never had a terribly nuanced understanding of sound design and always feel ill-equiped to find interesting nominees and usually just default to nominating the noisiest action movies of the year and that’s even more pronounced this year as I don’t think I came up with a single creative nominee. Sorry about this.

1917: If there’s anything particularly surprising about the sound in 1917 it’s actually how quite it is. This is a war that was so known for endless noise that the moments where it was quiet on the Western Front it was considered notable enough to write novels about, and yet there are actually quite a few moments here where things do become rate quiet in between the battle scenes. But make no mistake, those battle scenes are loud as fuck.

Ford V Ferrari: There are certainly long stretches of Ford V. Ferrari that are not really showcases for sound quality, but once the cars start revving things quickly become audio showcases. The sound team on this movie almost certainly needed to track down all sorts of vintage cars to record noises from to make this movie they also likely needed to create that whoosh of racecars going past on a track.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters: Kaiju movies have long been great showcases of sound design even when they were being made on the cheap. They are essentially disaster movies that need to record all sorts of crumbling buildings but they also need to bring some cool monster sounds to the table. The Godzilla roar was more or less mastered in the first movie (and of course that was a variation on the sound developed by Toho back in the day) but this installment had to find modernized noises for various other monsters as well.

The Lighthouse: The one movie here that isn’t being nominated for filling the screen with noise is The Lighthouse, which has a careful sound design that was based in blending sound effects with Mark Korven’s ambient music. The sound designer needs to make sure that the ocean waves are often audible in the background along with seagull cries. But what really sets it apart are the audio tricks used during the semi-dream sequences that add to the film’s fantastical quality. Also the fart noises are top rate.

Rocketman: This would be the year’s representative of how best to handle the mixing of music in a movie. As far as the music goes Rocketman is more of a Hollywood musical than a biopic so most of the music needs to exist in the movie in a different way than they would in, say, Bohemian Rhapsody. They need to fit a sort of midpoint between a live performance and the original recordings while also making the various characters singing work together. I think they do a pretty good job.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

I take some solace in knowing that Godzilla would crush that lighthouse.

Best Editing
Editing is one of the hardest element of a film to judge from the final product given that you don’t really know what raw material the editors had to work with and how much of what was done in the editing room was simply planned out months ahead of time, but it’s far to integral a part of filmmaking not to honor so we do our best.

Avengers: Endgame: Avengers: Endgame is a movie that runs over three hours long and yet you pretty much never heard anyone bitch about its runtime. There are probably a lot of factors in play as to why that is but the editing is almost certainly part of it. But the bigger reason this is nominated here is how effectively the movie is able to cut between the film’s various storylines as the “time heists” are going on at the same time. That’s a tricky juggling act and the movie pulls it off in a way that makes it look easy.

The Irishman: How do you make a three and a half hour movie feel like a two and a half hour movie? You bring in Thelma Schoonmaker, that’s how. She and Scorsese have been working together since the beginning of both of their careers and this is another perfect example of them working in lock step. The cutting here is by nature not going to be as flashy as it is in something like Raging Bull or Casino given its somber tone but it does need to handle some tricky chronology switches while keeping the aging issues from being too jarring.

The Lighthouse: Movies with only two characters can potentially be just as hard to edit than movies with large casts, probably more so because you’re kind of stuck cutting between two and only two people and don’t have as many ways to escape from that dynamic. The Lighthouse has that challenge to deal with but also has other challenges like conveying the passage of a rather undetermined amount of time and of course it also needs to do all sorts of crazy editing during some of the nightmarish freakout scenes.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Though a bit slower paced than some of Tarantino’s earlier movies, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood never becomes dull because of that and is editor Fred Raskin deserves some credit for that. There are a lot of separate editing challenges in the film; it needs to handle the editing of the more violent scene toward the end of course but it also needs to handle some really tense moments like Cliff’s trip to the Spahn Ranch and it also needs to handle some comedic cutaways to make jokes connect.

Uncut Gems: While a lot of the other movies here are meant to be sleek and controlled this one is kind of meant to have a degree of chaos to it. The film basically follows one character as he deal with all sorts of hectic shenanigans of his own making. The film’s editing in turn gives the film a sort of frantic feel as it follows him around through a couple crazy days. The real standout sequence though is the finale, where the Safdies and their editors make the process of watching a basketball game on TV seem incredibly tense and intercut that perfectly with action going on at a different location.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Your loss

Good choices. Parasite definitely deserved its win and probably could have got a nod for Editing too. Speaking of, these year seems especially difficult to tell what was the Best Editing. Very tight category.

Really?

HELL yeah! That score is fantastic.


I might have given a nod to Uncut Gems, but I haven't seen A Hidden Life (much to my shame) or Monos.

Best Soundtrack
The Best Soundtrack category is not an award tied to whatever gets released as an official album to the public but is instead an award for what movie makes the best use of pre-existing source music throughout its run time to best improve the overall movie.

Hustlers: Among other things, Hustlers is a period piece set in the late 2000s and early 2010s, which wasn’t that long ago but is long ago to have some light nostalgia around it and it’s fun to revisit it through the film’s soundtrack. Given that the movie is set in the world of nightclubs its soundtrack is of course filled to the brim with the stripclub anthems of the era including some memorable uses of “Make it Rain” by Fat Joe and “Love in This Club” by Usher but there are other things to be found here including some prominent Janet Jackson song and there are some non-club related music selections like a moment where “Royals” by Lorde is used as the movie’s “Layla” in a pivotal scene.

The Irishman: The Irishman takes place over the course over the course of more than five decades and I’m sure it would have been really tempting to use popular music as a means of showing the transition of time and also would have been a great excuse for Scorsese to indulge in all the 60s and 70s rock and roll cues that were all over the place in his other gangster movies, but instead he fills the whole movie with music from the 1950s, the decade where Sheeran began “painting houses.” Perhaps this was done to signify how the character never really evolved past that point and remained in a weird sort of arrested development.

Joker: The movie An American Werewolf in London does this weird thing where it fills its soundtrack with songs that just happen to have the word “Moon” in them like “Bad Moon Rising” and “Blue Moon.” It shouldn’t work but it kind of does. Joker does something kind of similar by including a bunch of songs with clown like imagery like Jimmy Durante’s version of “Smile" and Frank Sinatra’s rendition of “Send in the Clowns” as well as such songs as “Everybody Plays the Fool" and "My Name Is Carnival.” The film does not stick to this motif religiously however and follows that traditional pop to also include the thematicly resonant “That’s Life” as well as more (relatively) modern needle drops like “White Room” and “Rock and Roll Part 2” to great effect.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Quentin Tarantino started his career by making movies that were set during contemporary time periods but which thrived off of the music of the past but this is the first time he’s making a movie that’s actually set during a “classic rock” era and he takes a different approach as a result. Music often appears in the movie dietetically through people listening to KHJ or playing records or even reel-to-reel systems. Tarantino makes discoveries like “Good Thing” by Paul Revere & the Raiders and Neil Diamond’s "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show" but doesn’t ignore the major hits of the era like Deep Purple’s “Hush” either.

Waves: Before it premiered there were some erroneous reports that Waves was a musical, which it decidedly isn’t, but you can see where that confusion may have come from because the film has wall to wall music to the point where Trey Edward Shults included MP3s of certain song selections in digital versions of the script he sent around. The music selections are very hip and now as well, lots to high end hip-hop and R&B like Frank Ocean, Kendrick Lamar, SZA, Chance the Rapper, Kanye West, and Kid Cudi as well as an undercurrent of indie rock from the likes of Animal Collective and Tame Impala. In a way the music here is almost too good as it’s one thing that kind of tips you off to the fact that this is a white Pitchfork reading millennial making a movie about black teenagers, but still it’s hard to argue with the song selections.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Once soundtrack is fantastic.

No.

Not the choice I was expecting, but I can see the argument for it. The movie does indeed look sharp as hell. I probably would have given it to The Lighthouse, but Us is a good pick. Your other nominees are great too. Much as I shit on Joker, it does look great and is easily the best looking comic-book movie of the year.

If any movie got snubbed, it's probably Little Women, but this category is pretty stacked.