BEST SOUND EDITING:
- BABY DRIVER
- BLADE RUNNER 2049
- DUNKIRK
- THE SHAPE OF WATER
- STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI
Who Will Win?
If sound editors and sound mixers do their job right, the audience shouldn’t notice. It’s admirable for them to not call attention to themselves, but it makes it hard as hell to analyze their work, let alone predict the winners. Going by their tasks, I take into consideration the challenges required for each category and the level of challenge each film asks of them. I also look at trends of winners.
For sound editing, the challenge is collecting all the sounds required in the film. The ones who share the most challenge is science fiction; which leads the award in favor Blade Runner 2049. Sound editors Mark Mangini and Theo Green had to immerse us into a futuristic universe with multiple settings, from a modern metropolis to a desert wasteland. They also had to create the sound of a hologram.
But that’s nothing compared to the confrontation between Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) and K (Ryan Gosling) in an abandoned casino. In the background, holograms of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and Liberace flash in and out. Hearing the music go in and out with the holograms as the characters try to find each other in the darkness is deserving of the award alone.
But these categories also love war movies, which means great odds for Dunkirk. Adding to those odds is sound editor Richard King already winning for The Dark Knight and Inception, two other beloved Christopher Nolan films. This film relies on the sounds of bullets and air flight to create a sense of dread for the incoming enemy.