Best Art Direction

The Art Directors Guild is more in step with the Academy than their Costume Designing counterparts. Though the ADG has been handing out awards for two more hears than the CDG, they’ve only had three Oscar mismatches (as opposed to the CDG’s four). And whereas the Oscar winners weren’t even nominated for CDG Awards in the mismatch years, every one of the Academy’s choices for Best Art Direction were at least nominated by the ADG. In addition, they usually match the Academy’s nominees four out of five.

However, a Lemony Snicket win is by no means guaranteed in this category either. Pointless Trend Alert: The ADG’s mismatches have occurred in every even year after their inception in 1996 (when The English Patient won both the ADG and Academy Awards). If this pattern holds, then we’re due for another mismatch this year, and another potential win for The Aviator.

But not so fast: I think Lemony Snicket has a much better shot in this category than in Best Costume Design. As Jim Emerson notes, many times with the Academy, it’s not about quality so much as quantity (not to dismiss the quality of Snicket’s art direction, which I happened to love) and the movie with the most Art Direction often wins. It worked for Rick Heinrichs on Sleepy Hollow (again, I don’t mean to disparage the quality of his work there, which was most deserving of both its ADG Award and its Oscar) where the entire film was, like Snicket, shot entirely on sets, with all outdoor locations artificially constructed inside a soundstage.

When I started writing this post, I was ready to bet on The Aviator, but I think I’ve persuaded myself to shift support to Lemony Snicket for the win on Sunday (though I'm still a bit worried about it being more stylized and hyper-real than even recent winners Chicago, Moulin Rouge! and Sleepy Hollow -- something which I think may have contributed to ADG winner What Dreams May Come's (somewhat ironic, given its title's source) loss to Shakespeare in Love at the Oscars). We’ll see if I should’ve stuck to my gut.

Oh and here’s a fun little bit of trivia I noticed – in 1996, all but one of the Academy’s Best Art Direction nominees were based on stage productions. The winner? The lone non-theatrically-originated film: The English Patient.