Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 5, 2024 12:17:22 GMT -5
Best Musical PerformanceThe fist of the two musical performance categories, this looks specifically at scenes where people actively perform songs on screen, making it different from the Best Use of Source Music category which focuses on background music. This is kind of a rough year for this category as there weren’t a lot of mainstream musicals and as of this writing I have yet to see two of the big ones that did come out (Wish and Wonka) so I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for a couple of them but I was able to come up with five nominees that I don’t hate. “Dear Alien (Who Art In Heaven)” – Asteroid City: The sequence comes a bit after the “close encounter” at the center of Asteroid City leaving everyone to process the revelation that we’re not along in the universe. The school teacher is trying to teach a now dated lesson in astronomy to the class but all anyone wants to talk about is the alien, to the point where one kid and the cowboy band that’s been in the movie’s periphery decide this is the time to debut a bluegrass song on the topic before breaking into a spaceman themed square dance. The song, written by of all people Pulp lead singer Jarvis Cocker, is a hoot but the bigger point of the scene is to underscore the many different ways people are processing this revelation.
“I’m Just Ken” – Barbie: Barbie culminates in a full battle scene between the Kens, but rather than filming this like a war movie Gretta Gerwig opts to turn it into a musical scene in what is otherwise not a musical movie. The song itself is comedic in its self-seriousness with Ken rhapsodizing about his existential confusion at Barbie’s disinterest in him and his own “blone fragility.” Eventually this transitions into a sort of hair metal power ballad that reaches a crescendo in which the two main Kens are transported to an abstract universe where they have a sort of Broadway style dance-off where they resolve their differences, but only after its too late to change the Barbieland constitution.
“What About Love” – The Color Purple: In terms of the actual music, “What About Love” is far from my favorite song in The Color Purple. I’d probably lean more towards “Push the Button,” “Keep it Moving,” or “Hell No” in that regard, but in terms of the wider scene this is doing a lot more than those movies. The ballad, which explores the Sapphic undertones of relationship between Celie and Shug, has the two going to a movie theater to see the The Flying Ace (an “race film”) and are transported into this Hollywood musical fantasy sequence themed around the melodrama of that movie and sing this song to each other, the closest the two characters come to consummating their feelings towards one another. “Meet in the Middle” – Flora and Son: In this scene from John Carney’s Flora and Son Flora is on the roof of her building doing her weekly Zoom guitar lesson with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Jeff and the two start dueting on the song that they’ve been working on. Then right as they get to a chorus Jeff appears behind Flora and they appear to play together in person rather than over Zoom. It’s a sweet little scene in which the two are able to connect despite the long distance, a concept that’s mirrored in the lyrics of the song, and the duet shows that Flora is growing as a musician and that the two are connecting musically.
“Naa Ready” – Leo: In terms of raw music quality and choreography, this scene from the Tamil-language Indian blockbuster Leo is almost certainly the best of the scenes nominated here despite being kind of mid by Kollywood standards. The scene, set in a flashback, has the film’s title character celebrating a breakthrough by his criminal empire, has actor Vijay singing a pretty catchy song in front of a ludicrous number of extra all dancing in impressively synchronized unison. As sheer spectacle it’s very impressive but it’s also kind of comes out of nowhere and is just shamelessly dropped in the middle of what is otherwise not really a musical film and it’s kind of a tonal break from this violent flashback sequence. And the Golden Stake Goes to…Barbie This is one of the year’s most iconic sequences and ultimately that’s probably what carried it to victory here, but the choice wasn’t made without reservations. In a lot of ways this is emblematic of how ramshackle this movie can be at times and in a lot of ways the whole number exists in order to conceal the fact that the movie kind of deus ex machinas its way out of its central conflict in a not terribly logical way. However, it’s a very weak year for this category and I have similar reservations about a lot of the other nominees here and because of that the popularity of this scene is enough for me to stop overthinking this and give it to the song everyone likes.
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Feb 5, 2024 12:54:33 GMT -5
Yeah, not a great year for this category but the winner was one of the highlights of the movie.
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 5, 2024 14:17:28 GMT -5
Hard to argue against this one for sure.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 5, 2024 18:01:34 GMT -5
Probably the right choice... but man do I love Dear Alien, a wonderful surprise that also is clearly built to by the film and lasts exactly the right amount of time.
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Post by Neverending on Feb 5, 2024 19:30:03 GMT -5
Yeah, not a great year for this category but the winner was one of the highlights of the movie. Hard to argue against this one for sure. Probably the right choice... but man do I love Dear Alien, a wonderful surprise that also is clearly built to by the film and lasts exactly the right amount of time. Y'all trippin’. |
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 5, 2024 20:41:50 GMT -5
Peaches blows ass.
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 5, 2024 20:44:55 GMT -5
What Coop said.
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Feb 5, 2024 20:57:39 GMT -5
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IanTheCool
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Post by IanTheCool on Feb 5, 2024 21:09:22 GMT -5
Peaches is total garbage
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 5, 2024 21:11:11 GMT -5
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Post by Neverending on Feb 5, 2024 23:00:20 GMT -5
I guess we know the real winner. |
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 6, 2024 9:14:50 GMT -5
Warning: Heavy spoilers in the captions for most of these
Best Use of Source MusicThe category, which I would name “Needledrop of the Year” if I had created it today, focuses on the best uses of existing source music in films for the year. I’m looking at the scenes as a whole for this and how well they employ the song in question and employ or subvert your existing feelings about the music. “The Power of Love” by Frankee Goes to Hollywood – All of Us Strangers: This would be the second year in a row where we get a highly resonant needledrop to represent the death or impending doom of a character played by Paul Mescal. This one comes from the rather mysterious ending of All of Us Stranger in which we learn Mescal drank himself to death and has been a ghost for much of the film. The main character then sees himself off by playing this surprisingly sincere ballad by the queer synth pop band Frankee Goes to Hollywood, who are mostly known as one hit wonders on this side of the Atlantic but who apparently have a deeper catalog than I’d realized. It really finishes things off on a strong somber note. “Closer to Fine” by The Indigo Girls/“Push” by Matchbox 20 – Barbie: The song “Closer to Fine” by The Indigo Girls is something of a motif through Barbie as a song representing a very specific feminine vibe-out anthem. As such it’s jarring and pointed when Ken takes over the radio right as Barbie is listening to it and switches the song to his preferred tune of the moment: “Push” by Matchbox 20. That particular song choice is brilliant as the definitive “Ken” song in that it’s “I want to push you around” lyrics kind of seem to be evoking domestic abuse, but it’s a very unconvincing variety of male toxicity because it’s coming from Rob Thomas, who is sort of the Ken Doll of rock stars. The song’s impetuous “well I will, well I will” really captures how inept Ken is going to be at his patriarchal takeover because he’s just not really “that guy.”
“Always Be My Baby” by Mariah Carey – Beau is Afraid: Ari Astor’s wackadoo art film Beau is Afraid would seem to be the last place in the world you’d expect to hear a Mariah Carey given her status as a hyper-commercialized pop singer. Indeed, Astor has talked in interviews about just how far outside of his budget range the licensing on this song was. It’s good that he got the studio to pony up the cash though because this needledrop, which is played diegeticly late in the film by the Parker Posey character on her phone while she and Beau share a uniquely uncomfortable sex scene that doesn’t end well for either party. The song selection is subversive in and of itself but once you put together the two different ways the song’s lyrics could apply to the situation it becomes pretty dark in its implications. “I Will Always Love You” by Dolly Parton – Pricilla: For reasons that should be obvious the Elvis Presley estate wasn’t willing to license any of the man’s music to Sofia Coppola’s Pricilla about the man’s tumultuous marriage. The film makes lemonade out of these lemons by including a bunch of songs from female artists of the era like Brenda Lee and perhaps most subversively it ends with Pricilla driving away from Graceland to the sounds of Dolly Parton’s original rendition of “I Will Always Love You.” On its face this song perfectly captures the bittersweet nature of Pricilla’s decision to leave the rock star and fits the tone of the scene perfectly but the song selection gets an extra charge when you know about its history and the fact that Parton refused to license it to Elvis himself back in the 60s to retain control over her work rather than hand it over to a man. “Murder on the Dance Floor” by Sophie Ellis-Bextor – Saltburn: Saltburn is probably the most divisive movie of the year and this bold final scene likely rubbed salt into the wounds of the people who were annoyed with the film leading up to this ending. In the scene Oliver Quick, having murdered the entire Catton family and inherited their mansion, takes a sort of victory lap by stripping butt naked and then dancing through the halls of the house all in one unbroken shot while this homicide themed early 2000’s club hit plays in the background. The scene shows the extent to which this sociopath is completely unrepentant over what he’s done but also reveals a certain shallowness to his victory, he got what he wanted but all he does once he has it is wave his dick at his hard won prize. And the Golden Stake goes to… Beau is Afraid
This Mariah Carey song is intended to be about love enduring between her and her “baby” years after they’ve separated, hopefully resulting in a reunion someday. In many ways this scene is about that happening with Beau and Elaine: they were separated on the cruise as teenagers but their bond remained for years and they’ve now reunited. She’ll always be a part of him and he’s a part of her indefinitely. However, the song’s title takes on a whole new meaning when you consider that Elaine appears to be on the payroll of Beau’s mother and this whole rendezvous may be part of her elaborate plan to keep him under her thumb. Through this lens the “baby” in the title becomes more literal: he’ll always be a child under his mother’s control and all the lyrics like “boy don't you know you can't escape me” and “No way you're never gonna shake me” suddenly become a lot more sinister. Do do doop dum indeed.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 6, 2024 9:47:39 GMT -5
One of my big blindspots this year still.
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 6, 2024 11:27:40 GMT -5
I watched it again recently, and it remains hands-down one of the most memorable scenes in a movie filled with those.
Still love that weird-ass movie, by the way.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 7, 2024 9:18:15 GMT -5
Best MakeupThe award for best makeup is pretty self-explanatory, it goes to the movie that best uses makeup effects to achieve storytelling ends. When choosing nominees I try to break out a little from the usual old age makeup that certain other awards bodies obsess over, but when that kind of work is good too I’m not going to get in its way either. Golda: So… the only reason I saw this thing was because it got an Oscar nomination for Best Makeup and it wasn’t on a streaming service I have so I had to pay $4 to rent the damn thing. That was annoying and the movie’s not very good… but they weren’t wrong about the makeup being good. Here Helen Mirren plays Golda Meir circa 1973 when the Israeli Prime Minister would have actually been three years younger than Mirren is now but years of stress and tons of cigarettes had aged her well past Mirren’s current look and the makeup team successfully transforms Mirren into her in ways that weren’t particularly unrealistic or distracting. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: The makeup team for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 reportedly used 22,542 prosthetics on over a thousand actors and in doing so set a world record for most prosthetics used on a single film previously held by Ron Howard’s The Grinch. Of course if that movie is any indication, most isn’t always best, but there’s plenty of quality to be found here. The record was most likely set because of all the film’s human/animal hybrids, but the real standout is the film’s villain The High Evolutionary, who sort of has his skin stapled to his skull in a memorable way… not to mention the circumstances of his demise.
Maestro: Maestro covers the life of Leonard Bernstein from roughly the age of 25 up to about the age of 70 and Bradley Cooper plays the man at all of these ages and employed Kazu Hiro to provide elaborate makeup effects to accomplish this. I’m not really that familiar with what Bernstein looked like during those ages but the transformation that they’re able to accomplish during the sections where Bernstein is middle aged and elderly is really pretty amazing, Cooper is barely recognizable. One also shouldn’t forget about the work done on Carey Mulligan during these scenes as well both in terms of aging and in terms of depicting her deteriorating health towards the end. Poor Things: There are some makeup challenges throughout Poor Things like making Emma Stone look increasingly less disheveled over the course of the film as wells as some surgical gore makeup, but of course the makeup effect the film will be remembered for is the work done to bring Willem Dafoe’s character to life. Godwin Baxter acts as a the Dr. Frankenstein bringing Bella to life but he was also experimented on as a child, making him rather resemble Frankestein’s monster. The makeup team carefully gave him just enough scarring to look like particularly deformed while still not going so far as to truly make him a monster and the results are striking but not distracting. Renfield: Nicholas Cage has long been an actor willing to be… less than naturalistic in his performances and makeup can definitely be an extension of that. He’s particularly “out there” while playing Count Dracula in the horror comedy Renfield. The character’s base makeup with exaggerated paleness and nasty teeth is interesting unto itself, but what really puts the movie over the top were the early sections of the movie after Cage’s Dracula was charred by the sun and is slowly healing and seems to be in some new state of reconstruction every time he shows up afterwards. And the Golden Stake Goes to…MaestroSometimes with these categories I agonize over who’s going to win but other times it’s readily obvious from the minute I see the film that they’ll be winning, and in the case of Maestro it was already close to a foregone conclusion as soon as I started seeing set photos of Cooper coming out wearing all that stuff. Props to the other nominees though, they all did very interesting things in this field, but between his work on Looper, Darkest Hour, and Bombshell Kazu Hiro has really proven himself to be a modern master in this field who’d on another level from what anyone else is doing.
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 7, 2024 10:42:54 GMT -5
I can agree with that.
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Feb 7, 2024 15:12:22 GMT -5
Dracula stirring the pot with that choice. |
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 7, 2024 15:39:37 GMT -5
Dracula stirring the pot with that choice. Guardians your pick? |
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 8, 2024 8:39:33 GMT -5
Best Sound DesignI’ve made no secret of the fact that I, a dude who routinely watches movies through tinny TV speakers, am not particularly qualified to judge cinema audio even under the best of circumstances and I’d be lying if I said I spent too much time focusing in on sound mixing when attending movies. In fact I’ve often felt guilty just nominating the five loudest action movies of the year for the award, but this year I do feel like I’ve put a bit more thought into at least some of these choices and have found a good mix of traditional sound showcases with movies doing things that are a bit more experimental. Ferrari: Michael Mann was long known for recording gunshots and shootouts more crisply than most other directors in his field and with Ferrari we get that Mann touch with motors and engines, which are themselves historically huge showcases of audio design. Not only is Ferrari filled with cars whooshing by it specifically revolves around vintage motors which the team here has lovingly recorded. On top of that the film needs to handle the way in much of the second half it’s cutting between these loud race scenes and quieter dramatic moments away from the track and the sound mixing needs to make these transitions seem less jarring.
Napoleon: Cannons! War movies are generally big players in sound categories given the utter chaos and noise of battlefields but that feels extra true with period pieces like Napoleon that get to make uses of artillery volleys these wonderful firearms that fill soundtracks with rolling booms that immediately make audiences perk up. Add on top of that the galloping of cavalry charges and the dozens of muskets that get fired in quick succession and you really have an excellent showcase for what modern surround sound can do and this movie takes up that challenge wonderfully.
Oppenheimer: In many ways Oppenheimer is a movie you go to expecting to hear a particular sound in full IMAX surround sound: the booming of an atomic bomb. During the actual Trinity test the movie actually rather cleverly denies this to the audience, having the bomb go off in silence and then many seconds later has that sound rush at us like thunder rolling after a flash of lightning. And as it turns out that sequence isn’t even the film’s biggest sonic showcase, that would be the Golden Stake winning Victory Rally sequence with its sudden nuclear inspired audio drops and its stomping crowd which become a motif in the film, an experimental touch emblematic of the strong audio work in the film.
Skinamarink: At first glance one could accuse the experimental horror film Skinamarink of actually having terrible sound design as it and the rest of the film are intentionally lo-fi. The film is an example of “analog horror,” a sort of artistic movement that finds the fear in the aesthetics of old video formats, which is just as true about the film’s soundscape as it is its visuals. The film is awash in the sound of static and out of that static come these unearthly noises including these really faint voices that are almost inaudible and require subtitles in order to comprehend. Clearly it’s not the most technically sophisticated of these mixes but it may well be the most essential one.
The Zone of Interest: The Zone of Interest is another movie that avoids the noisiness one associates with Best Sound categories and is instead here for a being a particularly quiet movie which uses sound design in a clever way to chilling ends. The film is mostly devoid of music and is pretty willing to stand in quietness but as people are talking you occasionally hear a gun shot, or a guard dog barking, or a person’s yelling coming from the death camp the characters are living next to. Every time it happens it’s chilling, but not as chilling as the fact that the characters react to this with the same casualness that you or I would to hearing a police siren in the distance. It’s a use of audio that really highlights the message of the film and it’s calibrated just right to not feel like a crass gimmick. And the Golden Stake goes to…SkinamarinkThis is an award that normally goes to movies like 300, Godzilla, or Dune which shake the room. Occasionally I’ve gone a bit in the other direction and given it to something like Sound of Metal or A Quiet Place which do something particularly showy and The Lighthouse was another win for something a bit atmospheric, but I’m not sure I’ve ever gone quite this far into rewarding minimalism. The Zone of Interest also does some experimental things with its soundscape, but that’s more of a nomination for having an innovative idea, this on the other hand also feels like something that required expert execution to pull off in a way that actually has the very specific effect the filmmakers were going for and they pull it off to great effect.
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frankyt
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Post by frankyt on Feb 8, 2024 9:03:39 GMT -5
I mean I'll pitch in a couple bucks so you can upgrade to at least a 5.1 soundbar.
Gotta step your game up on movies. Sound is an integral part.
Still need to do skinamarink. But I feel like I'll kinda hate it's meandering nature.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 8, 2024 9:23:00 GMT -5
I mean I'll pitch in a couple bucks so you can upgrade to at least a 5.1 soundbar. Gotta step your game up on movies. Sound is an integral part. The real problem is that I live in an apartment and need to keep my volume down to avoid annoying my neighbors, so I don't see a lot of point shelling out for speakers that I'm not going to give a workout to anyway. |
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frankyt
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Post by frankyt on Feb 8, 2024 9:43:32 GMT -5
Why do they complain a lot or something?
You're allowed to play music and movies loudly at a reasonable hour. Don't let em convince you otherwise.
And it's not necessarily the loudness it's the clarity and crispness. The surrounded-ness.
It's worth it handily for a few times outta the year your neighbors bang on the walls. And really.... Kinda fuck them if it's a reasonable hour.
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 8, 2024 10:29:59 GMT -5
I haven't seen Skinamarink, but that whole concept sounds better-suited as a short film than something feature-length.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 8, 2024 14:23:04 GMT -5
The board's resident Skinamarink stan (me) is eating well.
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thebtskink
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Post by thebtskink on Feb 8, 2024 14:47:37 GMT -5
Still haven't seen it, mostly due to being teased with this song at a young age
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