On Thursday morning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the five nominees for excellence in costume design. The art of design and choices in the field contribute not only to the look and feel of a film, but are integral for an actor in defining his or her character.
Jacqueline Durran, who is well known for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’s acclaimed tailoring and a certain emerald green dress in Atonement, and who won her first Academy Award in 2013 for lavishly stylish Anna Karenina, is nominated for Mr. Turner. She looked to early photography and etiquette books for historically accurate representations of period clothing and characters, usually with little time to plan since director Mike Leigh’s films evolve without a script.
Anna B. Sheppard and Jane Clive are nominated for Maleficent – Sheppard’s third nomination and Clive’s first. Earlier this year, Sheppard told me how her inspirations for Angelina Jolie’s vindictive villain, who is garbed in dramatic items like a feathered collar with an exposed spine, included avant-garde art-fashion and designers like Alexander McQueen. They enlisted the help of designers who work in the niche where art, costume and fashion intersect: Artisans like Manuel Albarran, who has crafted one-off performance body sculptures for Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. They also took cues from Jolie’s own insistence throughout the preparation process (one in which the star was creatively hands-on at Pinewood Studios) that the costumes also be elegant.
Surprising no one, the formidable Colleen Atwood is nominated for Rob Marshall’s adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and James Lepine’s fairy tale-musical mashup Into the Woods. The three-time Academy Award winner (for Alice in Wonderland, Memoirs of a Geisha and Chicago, and nominated a further seven times) built elaborate costumes from different fairy tale eras for a cast that included Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp and Emily Blunt. In several cases, she and her team wove, painted or manipulated the material they made from scratch before breaking them down again.
Nominees also include costume-design legend and fellow three-time Oscar winner Milena Canonero (A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, Chariots of Fire), whose work on The Grand Budapest Hotel adds to Wes Anderson’s wholly imagined imaginary universe. From an eccentric heiress (what a joy it must be to work with Tilda Swinton!) to groups that range from hotel guests to thugs to prisoners, and across political regimes and three distinct design eras, each costume balances on the edge of humour and melancholy – for the montage imagining various fictional Golden Keys hotels through the costumes of lobby boy and concierge alone!
For his work on the wide-ranging characters that populate a Los Angeles still crawling out from under the shadow of Charles Manson in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, Mark Bridges earns his second Oscar nod. (The costume designer has worked on all the auteur’s features since 1996’s Hard Eight, but was nominated for and won his first Academy Award in 2012 for his work on Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist.) Based on the genre-bending 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice follows shaggy amateur sleuth Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) around the fictional Gordita Beach of 1970 (based on Manhattan Beach, where Pynchon himself lived), encountering denizens across a swath of the period’s local subcultures. Fun fact: Bridges based the lead’s look of frayed and faded plaid-flannel shirts, surfer sandals, hats and an army surplus jacket on images of Neil Young from the era.
In the week before the Oscars ceremony, the Costume Designers Guild honours design excellence from its members, and only the Guild further subdivides its nominations by genre: period, contemporary and fantasy. Many, myself included, have long wished that the Academy did the same; there is, yet again, not a single humble contemporary film among the nominees. The Academy almost never notices the challenges of good contemporary work, opting instead for showier fantasy and swishy period fare. (And if showy was the order of the day, where is Alexandra Byrne’s Guardians of the Galaxy or Kurt and Bart for their imaginative The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1?)
That tendency to bright and shiny objects might also explain why the decidedly unglamorous, downright discreet period film The Imitation Game is absent from the list. Here, English costume designer Sammy Sheldon offers a superb work of reconstruction, meticulously conjuring real people in a period shrouded in the Official Secrets Act, and adding imaginative and telling touches. (Benedict Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing, for example, often deliberately wears layers of geometric grid and pattern combinations, something not only symbolic, but that prewar photographs of the real Turing reveal he actually did).
As Sheldon explained to me last month, some of the verisimilitude is invisible for its own sake. Not that anyone but the actors would know it, but the wardrobe of Bletchley codebreakers Turing and Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) included real vintage: controlled-commodity clothing bearing the utility CC41 ration label, which is scarce.
But I may be most disappointed that there is no nod to Gone Girl’s Trish Summerville (known for another Girl, one with a Dragon Tattoo, and the first Hunger Games movie), because her contemporary costume design in that film adds depth to the improbable story. Summerville’s choice and use of an everyman oxford blue shirt for Ben Affleck (and at times other characters) in scenes throughout the film is particularly clever. In various incremental changes to its fit and states of repair, the shirt follows the fortunes of the domestic pair and is arguably the hardest-working wardrobe item of the year.