Oscars Predictions 2016: Best Film Editing

“Editing is where movies are made or broken. Many a film has been saved and many a film has been ruined in the editing room.” – Joe Dante. Here we predict who we think was the best of the best in 2015 and who we predict will win the Academy Award for Best Film Editing..

Nominees:

Dean – Mad Max: Fury Road

When it comes to the technical awards, particularly the visual categories, it is hard for any film to compete with Mad Max: Fury Road. A film with high octane action sequences needs to be edited in such a way that it keeps your attention. Especially a film which is essentially one long car chase. But Mad Max pulls it off brilliantly, eclipsing the efforts of Star Wars which would usually be the more obvious first choice for this award and is probably going to be Mad Max’s closest competition.

Also, I found this bit of IMDb trivia quite interesting:

The film editor, Margaret Sixel, is director George Miller’s wife. When she asked her husband why he thought she should do it as she had never edited an action film before, Miller replied, “Because if a guy did it, it would look like every other action movie.”

I’m not sure if it would have been better or worse if a male film editor did the job. But one thing is certain: every other action movie, it is not.

Stephen – Mad Max: Fury Road

The clear standout in this category is Mad Max: Fury Road, and that’s why it has my vote. Star Wars has amazing visual effects, but the way Mad Max is pieced together is absolutely stunning. The film is put together so meticulously that all of the chaos of the chase makes perfect sense and doesn’t make the audience rub their eyes and get a headache.

I’m worried for this category in that I think that a film like The Big Short or Spotlight may come out of nowhere and win this, as well as Best Picture; simply because those films deal with material that usually reels in a crazy number of Oscars. But The Big Short’s poor camera work isn’t saved by the editing, and Spotlight is very mundane when compared to the competition here. If genre bias come into effect for the film editing category, at the very least I’d expect The Revenant to take it, but my vote remains solidly behind Mad Max: Fury Road.

Well, we were all clearly in sync with this one. What is your prediction for Best Film Editing?

For more film ramblings, you can follow us on Twitter:

Stephen @thesnagel

Dean @deeno15

Tendai @1_platinum