How closely is this category related to Best Picture? In short, very. Over the last 40 years, only one movie has won Best Picture without earning an editing nomination. (And that was Birdman, which utilized invisible cuts.) And since the picture lineup expanded to more than five nominees in 2009, every single winner in the editing category has been a best-pic nominee… except 10 years ago, when The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo defied all statistics and beat out four Best Picture nominees for a surprise win. Which just goes to show that anything can happen—and provides a mild warning to Don’t Look Up, Dune, The Power of the Dog and King Richard that tick, tick…BOOM! (a Best Picture also-ran) could still make the final cut.
DON’T LOOK UP, Hank Corwin
Thirty years ago, in one of his earliest industry jobs, Corwin worked on the editing of Oliver Stone’s JFK, which won the award in this category. He didn’t get to share the trophy back then (he was an additional editor, a junior position), but Corwin obviously has a knack for the politically inflammatory, earning his third nom for Adam McKay’s multi-character climate change satire. Corwin was previously in the running for McKay’s The Big Short and Vice and a win would mark the first editing Oscar for a comedy, remarkably, since 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
DUNE, Joe Walker
Three-time nominee Walker approached his job on Dune almost as if it were a rock opera. “My background is in music, which always sort of made me feel like an imposter as an editor,” he said. “But this film made me not feel like that, because we really got something between departments. One of the things we were trying to get on this film was a tremendous sense of rhythm.” Though the relationship between craftsmen Villeneuve and Walker is strong (Dune marks their fourth collaboration), the editor preferred to steer clear of the epic film’s set—because, he said, “it’s really hard to cut things out after you’ve seen how much work goes into getting a shot.”
KING RICHARD, Pamela Martin
Scoring her second nomination here (after David O. Russell’s The Fighter in 2011), Martin is the sole woman in the lineup, though the category has honored legends such as Anne V. Coates (Lawrence of Arabia), Verna Fields (Jaws) and three-time winner Thelma Schoonmaker (Raging Bull). In King Richard, Martin’s expertise was most evident in later scenes featuring Venus Williams (Saniyya Sidney) struggling during a tennis match. “When Saniyya fell on court, she really tripped and fell,” said the film’s cinematographer Robert Elswit. “And the wonderful Pamela Martin used that moment to show that things were going bad for Venus.”
THE POWER OF THE DOG, Peter Sciberras
In just his fifth feature film, Australian Sciberras nabbed his first nomination for Jane Campion’s slow-burn Western. “The films I love to work on are a bit more on the atmospheric side,” said the editor, whose credits include The Rover and War Machine. In that vein, he explained that he’s particularly proud of a pregnant-with-meaning late scene in a barn between actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Kodi Smit-McPhee. “That scene was just catnip for an editor,” he said. “We wanted to show the subtle shift in their relationship and the tension there, which is calibrated and dangerous and has so many layers. It’ll be one of my favorite scenes until I finish my career.”
TICK, TICK… BOOM!, Myron Kerstein and Andrew Weisblum
Oscar prognosticators had expected that if a musical showed up in this category, it would have been West Side Story (co-edited by 91-year-old Michael Kahn). But the voters in this branch spotted the tricky feat achieved by Kerstein (In the Heights) and Weisblum (previously nominated for Black Swan) in collecting the many character threads that were added to a project that on the stage was originally a solo monologue and then a three-person show. And “keeping the film under two hours was a very good idea,” wrote Todd Gilchrist in TheWrap’s review, which added that the “lean and mean” pacing contributed significantly to the film’s success.
Steve’s Perspective
Something strange happened in this category at the precursor awards: Dune didn’t always win. The sci-fi epic took this category at BAFTA, but it lost to West Side Story (which wasn’t even Oscar nominated) at the Critics Choice Awards—and, most importantly, it was beaten by King Richard at the American Cinema Editors ACE Eddie Awards. While Dune may still be a slight favorite at the Oscars, King Richard is suddenly a very strong competitor.
