Oscar 2011 - Film Editing

Like I said last time this one is the aspect that might save or bury a film's cinematography, and with it most of the final visual aspect of the entire production. If the cinematography gives the movie the visual feeling = warm, cold, open, closed, etc, the editing is the the technical category which gives probably the most of the general feeling of the movie. And yes, in this is comprised also the sound mixing for aranging the final audio track, but usually the film editing is considered more important at the Oscars. As far as I know statistically speaking I think it's the one which is the most often associated with the best picture (having the same winner). I don't think it will happen this year though. Anyway, I find really hard to predict the winner here. Let's see which are the movies that got nominated ...

"Black Swan" - I believe this is the movie that will get the prize. Excellent editing, which enhances a lot the sense of tension, the dark atmosphere and completes it to give the image of dementia put on screen. Generally it's useless too comment the editing to much - the main aspect to follow is how it's built the scene from the individual shots, the way these follow one another and the length/for how much time. I didn't manage to find a better clip than the next one to show these, but it's suggestive enough about the movie look & feel.

"The Fighter" - it's the movie that I consider to be on the bottom of the grid here. The editing is ok, but it doesn't have anything special besides the boxing scenes. And that's the type of scene which has in itself more power to enhance the editing appearance than the editing does for the scene. Anyway .. I'm not an expert :). Unfortunately the most appropriate clip I found it's "embedding disabled", so sorry again for the extra click (it seems I didn't manage to get rid of this even without any "Inception" today :) ):

"The King's Speech" - I've already said it last time, here the editing helps a lot the cinematography. Below is the final scene of the movie (I don't know for how long it will last on YouTube), scene that I think it's one of the best in the entire film - also for the cinematography (which reaches a peek here), but I kept it for editing :) because I believe that it's more representative for the movie. Anyway, if above I was saying something about scenes that give a push to the editing, to say it so = have enough context to get something interesting from them, "The King's Speech" as a whole movie it's entirely the opposite to that. The story is calm, slow paced, without much action and that's not helping in this category, so even if it's ok the editing is under a certain threshold compared to other movies nominated here.

"127 Hours" - from my point of view has the best editing, but unfortunately this year is a bit of an outsider at the Oscars. I would really like to be wrong with the prediction here and to see it getting the award. I already wrote in the blog entry about the movie and I will say it again: for me it seems awfully challenging to try making a 90 minutes movie having as main scene a guy stuck under a boulder, and one of the key factors in managing to getting it done it's definitely the editing. Well .. the reason for "127 Hours" it's not really expected to win here is besides that there are more popular movies in competition, the fact that the editing (unlike "The King's Speech") is helped pretty much by the cinematography (which didn't receive an Oscar nomination, but it had it's share at BAFTA and in other places) = I'm pretty sure that the editor had quite a lot of choice to pick from the shots taken given the variety we see in the movie. Even so, I'll stick to the opinion that it's superior to the other titles.

"The Social Network" - it's probably the second on the favorites list (although many are saying it's the first and it already got the BAFTA for editing). As I mentioned, it's a hard to predict category because as I see it there are pretty 50/50 split chances among this one and "Black Swan" and I have some hope that I'll see a surprise from "127 Hours" :). The reason I'm placing this a little bit after "Black Swan" as chances is for one part related with the actual quality - even though it's an excellent editing that completes some lacks on the cinematography (which again I don't even know how come it got nominated) it still seems it's not really at the same level with the work in "Black Swan". On the second part, if the Academy wants to give another Oscar to "Black Swan" besides the one which is the most sure to bet on in the Awards night (for leading actress of course), I think they will have editing as the first choice. But, going back to "The Social Network" one of the nice parts is that despite having again a pretty much actionless movie, the editing manages to speed up the pace:

First entry next week - adapted script ;)