It's Just Like The Movies

Production Design

• Grand Tour, Thales Junqueira & Marcos Pedroso – Get ready for a lot of entries where I celebrate the blending of contemporary technique with callbacks to “doing things the old-fashioned way”, starting with the globe-trotting designs of Grand Tour. The recreations of British-controlled East Asia in 1917 are pristine, with every setting in the black-and-white narrative constructed on a soundstage. Each location is lush and detailed, suggestive of well-researched milieus rather than colonial fantasies, yet they also possess the lines, props, and structures used in movies from the 1910’s. She (Grand Tour) is feeling her fantasy, but as Gomes is wont to do, those fantasies are inescapably shaped by the world around them. Juxtaposing the soundstage sets with the locations as they currently exist makes their heightened verisimilitude even more impressive.
• Hamnet, Fiona Crombie & Alice Felton – What do you MEAN they BUILT the forest grove so central to several of Hamnet’s most intimate scenes? It’s such a perfectly constructed location I’d believed they just scoured it out in the wild. Hell, Crombie’s designs throughout are believable and eye-catching without looking fussed-over. Homes have the casual scuff that comes from generations of families living together under the same roof, while the clean lines of the architecture call back to theatrical spaces, incorporating prosceniums without becoming stagey. Color palettes, building materials, gardens, and personal objects communicate a lot about these characters. Sets accumulating detail and resonance as the makeup of the Shakespeare household changes. It all culminates at the Globe theater, which marries the natural and the domestic in Hamlet’s forest backdrop. What an evocative setting for Will and Agnes to wrestle with and expunge their grief. What a superbly crafted journey Crombie’s sets have made for them to get there.
• The Phoenician Scheme, Adam Stockhausen & Anna Pinnock – Unlike Marty Supreme or Sinners or Frankenstein, the immaculate sets of The Phoenician Scheme have the benefit of being lovingly attended to by its photography. Bruno Delbonnel visualizes Zsa-Zsa’s growing empathy for his fellow man by showing how the camera follows people through these doted-over environs, rather than making the actors into satellites or accessories for all the patterns, props, and pconstruction sites. This fetishization endows the film with an attentiveness towards its sets and museum pieces that’s never totally abated but always in service of human connection, befitting Anderson’s whole thing. The globe-trotting premise means a lot of unique locales with their own cultural currency, filtered through Stockhausen’s unparalleled ingenuity at turning Anderson’s dioramas (which are already livelier creations than they’re sometimes given credit for) into living, textured locations. And nothing in their prior outings prepares you for heaven.
• Resurrection, Liu Qiang and Tu Nan – Poses an incredibly difficult set of challenges for its production design team to realize. Each chapter has to have a distinct visual personality, without getting lost in its own extravagant ass (hi Poor Things). They must register as different eras, possessing their own reference points for cinematic stylization, color, and genre psychology, without succumbing to untethered pastiche. And they have to somehow cohere as a whole, without calling back to each other so overtly that the fantasy is lost. Liang nails these interconnected challenges to make the whole of Resurrection’s sets as vivid as each of its five parts. The exaggerated color stories and bizarre architectures of the frame story’s silent-era pastiche is as inventively designed as the spooky austerity of the ruined Buddhist temple. Finding the right locations to make the material reality of one-shot’s gangster love song as deftly assembled as the most opulent and artificial settings is a feat all its own. It’s an endless gallery of wonders, artfully enriching the narrative demands of each chapter and Bi Gan’s overall ambitions.
• The Testament of Ann Lee, Sam Bader – Self-effacing in the best way. The sets have one foot planted in period historicism and the other in the expansive structures of ’50s Hollywood musicals, minus the opulence. Locations like the Shaker’s boat to America have the open space and semi-artificial look of a soundstage. Imagine how surprised I was to read Fastvold shot this sequence on an actual ship and, in fact, most of Testament’s sets were built on location or scouted to maximally serve Fastvold’s braiding of reality and staginess. Bader’s sets have the clean lines and sturdy craftsmanship demonstrate the Shaker’s rigorous practice, as well as open spaces for their rapturous dancing and Fastvold’s smart, musical blocking.

Honorable Mentions: Oscar nominee Marty Supreme was almost represented on this list, with Jack Fisk’s scrupulous sets doing a lot to deepen and detail Marty’s escapades. For all my love towards Sound of Falling, I wonder if I’m underrating the seamless transformations the main house undergoes, with some changes starkly delineating eras while some designs are maintained for almost a century. One Battle After Another keeps itself planted firmly in the adjacent present, while leaning at different times into folk-heroism and absurdity. Peter Hujar’s Day. Hannah Beachler’s sets for Sinners are done dirty by the cinematography, but the period authenticity is impeccable from any angle – the juke joint alone is a marvel. Further honorable mentions to Drop’s Hitchcockian infusion of glamour and expanse in that giant, impractical Space Needle restaurant, the differently decaying spookhouses of Bring Her Back and Weapons, and the way Final Destination: Bloodlines makes every arena into a plausible environment jam-packed with potential with site-specific details are remarkable.

Costume Design

• Grand Tour, Silvia Grabowski – As with the production design, I love how Grabowski’s costumes register as period-authentic and camera-ready. The ensembles for the upper-class dilettantes are dapper and crisp, with any strain, crumple, or blemish surely more noticeable than their wearers would care to admit. Traversing through Asia surveys cultural trends and styles befitting Grand Tour’s tactility even in fantastical moments. Figures like the riverboat sailors with their beekeeper headpieces fit Gomes’ world of elegance and eccentricity. If the clothes have less overt silver-screen artificiality than the sets, they’re pound for pound at designing a world of detailed reality and out-of-time dreaminess.
• Hedda, Lindsay Pugh – I’m not sure any individual costume this year has lingered in my brain as searingly as Eileen Loveborg’s emerald green, breast-forward dress and unblemished white blouse. It’s a great encapsulation of this woman’s whole deal, at once confrontational in her sexuality yet covered and professional for an environment already unsettled by her presence. Party! Pugh dresses everyone for a night of carnivorous ’50s New Year’s festivities, in a color palette reminiscent of money and pears ready to rot. Each guest bringing their own mix of refinement and debauchery. Hedda herself embodies these ambitions quite nicely, with her tight top and voluminously layered petticoats. But is the olive color actually flattering, even with those smart accessories? Did she buy the matronly dress she sticks Imogen Poots in specifically to torture guests? The dresses bring an additional layer of conflict, intrigue, and sensuality to the women’s bodies, along with all the needling mind games Hedda is playing.
• One Battle After Another, Colleen Atwood – An excellent reminder of Atwood’s talent for character-revealing contemporary daywear. Remember her indelible ensembles for Silence of the Lambs, another top-tier Best Picture winner which thrives on the iconic looks she’s constructed – and where Oscar didn’t notice her unflashy brilliance. Bully to them for not celebrating Willa’s school dance outfit, a worn, combat-ready jacket and airy, feminine skirt that encompasses her personality so gracefully. The same can be said for Bob’s checkered robe and wool hat, or Lockjaw’s wardrobe of skintight black T-shirts, military uniforms, and slightly out-of-place formal wear. He tries really hard, unlike Perfidia Beverly Hills, whose wears her revolutionary fits with more comfort and physical assuredness than Lockjaw ever possesses. I love how all the French 75’s disguises for mingling among civilians look like they’re dressed for a business realness ball category. It’s a note of performativity that illustrates how organically real Atwood’s costumes are for One Battle’s most mundane and eccentric characters alike.
• Peter Hujar’s Day, Eric Daman and Khadija Zeggaï – The costuming aligns with Alex Ashe’s dexterous lensing in bringing Ira Sach’s experiments with the “real time” conceit of Linda Rosenkrantz’s interview. Linda and Peter’s clothes are attractive and stylish, and unlike Zeggaï’s more evocative outfits inn Passages, the outfits are never so declamatory on their own as to overwhelm the actors. The layers of buttoning-up and undress throughout the interview are sartorially intriguing, and they establish different dynamics of professionalism, trust, and comfort in each scene. Sometimes they’re actually conducting an interview, but something they’re colleagues in the same circles talking shit about coworkers, or besties sharing gossip and confiding intimate truths. It’s such smart, subtle work, even within an aesthetic framework that’s very ostentatious in other respects.
• Sinners, Ruth E. Carter – From my discussion with Cláudio Alves on this year’s Best Costume nominees (see link below): “Praising Ruth Carter’s ensembles, for me, usually begins at the edges and works into the main cast. I love how the Choctaw vampire hunters and the spirits summoned during “I Lied To You” have as much personality and cultural specificity as the main players. The relatively short time frame of Sinners means our large cast of characters gets only one or two costumes to make themselves known to the audience. We get to watch these characters dash around, sweating under the hot sun and working hard for their corner of 1930’s Mississippi, before they don their best wares for a night out. Even the folks working at the juke joint are dressed to dance and savor their freedom alongside their patrons. Carter’s costumes are one of several avenues Sinners uses to dramatize the thematic tension between Clarksdale’s nonwhite communities and the patina of “America” they’ve become enveloped in. The clash of worn denim and fitted suits beautifully dramatizes Smoke and Stack’s dissonance with their Delta roots, just as their own fits distinguish them far beyond the red/blue dichotomy.”

Honorable Mentions: First, all of Oscar’s nominees are doing some impressive work, and you can read my thoughts on them here. Setting them aside, I really loved the catalogue of unashamedly gay fashions in Latin Blood: The Ballad of Ney Matogrosso, finding so much self-expression and liberation with the underground punks and bohemian beach-goers. The costumes in Black Bag are arguably sexier than the convoluted plotting or erotic brinksmanship – everyone looks fabulous, and their outfits are so ravishing it’s hard to decide whether they should take off their clothes or keep them on. One of Them Days has great fun with sticking Keke and SZA in fun, sexy, character-revealing fits, even when they’re borrowing someone else’s clothes, and the wardrobes define the supporting cast much better than the script. Train Dreams is arguably a more inspired showcase of Malgosia Turzanska’s sartorial smarts than her Oscar-nominated work for Hamnet.

Score

• Highest 2 Lowest, Howard Drossin – A protege of Lee’s regular composer Terrence Blanchard suddenly given the spotlight, and he knocks this opportunity out of the fucking park. While so much starts on shaky ground, formally and narratively, the music delivers controlled, thrilling melodrama from the jump. As David King’s quest becomes tougher and more complicated, and as Highest 2 Lowest levels up its game considerably around the halfway, Drossin’s score responds in kind by playfully expanding its sound, filling up the pit with more instruments and trying out things I wasn’t even imagining were in its repertoire. He makes the movie pleasurable. New motifs and instruments are artfully added, making the music as calico and exciting as the many New Yorks that David encounters.
• Marty Supreme, Daniel Lopatin – One of the more baffling omissions from Oscar’s lineup, especially given this year’s limited pool of nominees. The music, more than any other artist in Marty Supreme, matches the titular character’s flamboyant, inventive desperation with more genuine cool than he could ever manufacture. Lopatin makes no attempt to sonically adhere to ‘50s America. Yet his classical stylings and ‘80s electronic beats clash productively with the Eisenhower-era milieu. Somehow choral interludes with woodwind accompaniment are just as appropriate as the endless croaking of frogs, strange and beautiful impulses that prove equally illuminating to Marty’s most grandiose dreams and intimate desires. There’s some Mark Snow and Angelo Badelamenti in Lopatin’s ability to be so emotionally blunt without making his compositions feel obvious or cloying. It’s a rare talent, and what a joy to hear him flex it in a venue designed for showing off.
• One Battle After Another, Johnny Greenwood – A less flamboyant score than many Greenwood’s prior collaborations with PTA, to say nothing of his insidious strings for Power of the Dog or Spencer’s embarrassingly self-flagulating despair. His scores often feel as though they’re thrashing on top of their films, so volcanically prepossessing it doesn’t matter whether they’ve been properly integrated into the action. This works gloriously in some cases, but I love how his score for One Battle After Another is able to be a nearly omnipresent force, shapeshifting conspicuously throughout, while still maintaining a slippery, sinuous momentum. Greenwood’s plunking piano is a great spine for the muscle systems of strings, horns, and percussion flexing throughout One Battle’s score. He braces concurrent events together as potently as the editing. The political thriller, the comedy, the intimate family drama, the grandiose plans of action, all of it is supported musically, with some elements coming to the fore at unexpected moments. Using the proximity radar melody so beautifully and so sparingly, is the cherry on top.
• Sex, Peder Kjellsby – While the characters in Sex try to articulate their ideas, sometimes with an absolute certainty in their meanings and sometimes grasping at ideas or interactions that didn’t feel so ephemeral until their orator began trying to express themselves (relatable), the music cuts through with pure expressions of feeling. Purity doesn’t mean distilled or simplified, not when the compositions and full orchestrations all have such rollicking, jazzy energy. But it matches the character’s experiences of stumbling earnestly into parts of themselves they didn’t know existed, sonorous and sometimes overwhelming but always sincere in the emotions being expressed. I didn’t immediately cotton to Kjellsby’s music, but his ingenuity across the Oslo trilogy as well as the specific ways his score enriches Sex have made it even more meaningful to me.
• The Testament of Ann Lee, Daniel Blumberg – One of the most nonsensical omissions from Oscar’s shortlists, by any fucking metric. I had wondered how much of the music in Ann Lee was original compositions made for the film versus Shaker tunes with new orchestral arrangements (which still seems pretty valid to me), but according to interviews from Blumberg and Fastvold, virtually no compositions exist to match the recorded lyrics of Shaker hymns. It’s all original, which made this citation even easier. So much of Blumberg’s challenge is to make the Shaker’s music as heated and spiritual as their ecstatic sermons demonstrate. He does this beautifully, capturing the improvisational, even ephemeral nature of their performances, evoking something so much bigger than any one person through his full orchestra and unpredictable movements. On a moment-to-moment level, Blumberg’s score accents each scene perfectly; as a film-wide achievement, he connects the intellectual, physical, and religious zeniths Ann strives to reach at every moment.

Honorable Mentions: Sirât’s pulse-pounding electronica was a very close sixth spot for this list, and a close second to Marty Supreme’s even more outre beats, but it’s as near and dear to my heart as my final five. Sinners is flexible with genre and orchestration, and has gotten more than enough love for me not to worry about hurting Ludwig Göransson’s feelings. Black Bag and Ghost Trail both provide serpentine scores for their spy games, each one attuned to the strains of suspense needed to make its mysteries entertaining. The same can be said for The Mastermind, whose snazzy beats get good mileage out of playing with and against its protagonist’s absurd feints at con artistry. Presence’s classical orchestrations provide an entry point into Soderbergh’s annoying experiment, even if it sometimes feels like an affectation overlaid onto this mid script. In the category of “this was interesting and/or supportive work in context, but not enough for its own sentence”: 2000 Meters to Andriivka, The Alabama Solution, Bugonia, Hedda, A House of Dynamite, Mickey 17, No Other Choice, The Phoenician Scheme, The Shrouds, Train Dreams, Weapons.

Makeup & Hairstyling

• April, Ludmila Iakobashvili, Sopo Machavariani & Kristyan Mallett – One of those nominations for only key player, but why be churlish when the final result is so striking? The distorted woman, a manifestation of the lead’s increasingly depressed self-image, remains an unsettling presence whenever she appears. Yet this figure isn’t defined as a ghoul but a deeply tired woman, aged and worn down by her work. She’s a surprisingly empathetic creation, another of April’s powerful intersections of psychic turmoil, physical groundedness, and sympathetic tenderness.
• Bring Her Back, Winbi Trang Nguyen & Larry Van Duynhoven – We’ve now entered the “Oops! All horror” portion of the category, (though could we count April as a kind of horror?), starting with more disturbing, seemingly very realistic gore from the Phillipou brothers. The makeup, like just about every formal element, is less artfully stylized than Talk to Me was two years ago in favor of somewhat ugly, blunt realism. At least the scrupulous skill of the makeup team remains the same, meaning someone trying to literally eat a knife is dramatized with a clinical attention that makes the blood and gristle even more upsetting. Watching these people literally rip themselves and each other apart is not a deeply appetizing prospect, but Bring Her Back’s makeup team (and the sound designers, my God) deserve credit for their brutal commitment.
• Sinners, Ken Diaz, Mike Fontaine, and Shunika Terry – A glorious fusion of Hollywood glamour and wet, meaty bodies under duress. Everyone in Sinners looks fabulous, without seemingly doted-over to achieve period affectations. It’s all organic, whether the character is diegetically wearing makeup or not, and it’s supremely flattering to a diverse palette of skin tones, accentuating the individual beauty of each character. There’s real care to make sure this cast looks good, especially when they’re glistening with sweat from dancing and working in a hot juke joint, befitting the gangster musical Sinners is dressed as for the first half. When the horror genre invades the film, the vampires’ reflective eye is a simple, unnerving way to signal their transformation. The fangs are less subtle but just as stirring. Blood, wet on the face and dried on the clothes, is applied and mixed with as much attention for skin color as the regular foundation, and wounds are graphic and convincing without ever making a lurid spectacle of these character’s deaths.
• The Ugly Stepsister, Thomas Foldberg & Anne Cathrine Sauerberg – Even more than the gonzo costume design or sound mixing, the makeup & hairstyling team is The Ugly Stepsister’s most consistent ally in applying penny dreadful grotesquery to a human body. One of the most effective prosthetics calls no attention to itself until the time of its destruction: Elvira’s nose, which fits her face so perfectly you’d never guess it’s not the one Lea Myren brought with her from home. The rudimentary plastic surgery is upsetting no matter who’s administering it, in part because The Ugly Stepsister stages these scenes to convince us Elvira’s body in real danger, highlighting the makeup and prosthetic team’s verisimilitude. The hair and makeup deserves extra credit for merging fairytale archetypes with period-adjacent realities across a whole ensemble of royals and social climbers, filling out a world others might have neglected in favor of gross delights.
• Weapons, Leo Satkovich & Melizah Anguiano Wheat – The ghostly pallor of the possessed townspeople is a nice bit of campfire tale spookiness, as is their somewhat congealed blood whenever they’re injured. They seem dead already, especially when they’re sent to do some dark bidding and their herky-jerky movements accentuate the wrongness of their whole deal. The breakdown of Benedict Wong’s face, the obliteration of his beau’s skull, the different abuses suffered by Ehrenreich and Abrams, all impressively realized. But of course the real coup is Aunt Gladys, whose hideous red wig and purposefully splotchy makeup all serve her disguise of dithering, improperly applied femininity. It’s a fantastic ploy, made better by the subtle gradations depending on who she’s trying to deceive and how. None of it can prepare us for how Gladys looks underneath her mug, a witch with nubby teeth decaying in real time, and nothing can prepare us to see what’s under all that.

Honorable Mentions: Out of any lineup, Makeup & Hairstyling has remained closest to how it looked for The Fifties. The Phoenician Scheme is only diva who missed the cutoff, but she still deserves credit for its gallery of colorful, precise, and dissimilarly styled characters. Superman’s makeup is even more creative than its visual effects, with its commitment to Silver Age character designs and Nic Hoult’s sexy, imperious baldness. I already suspect I’m overlooking the makeup in Resurrection, which seamlessly creates five faces for Jackson Yee across a variety of genres, and serves the rest of the case quite adeptly. Queens of Drama translates its character’s gender play, outré affectations, and plastic surgeries into character details, suggesting vivid evolutions over major time skips, and manages to be very conspicuous without becoming seamless or sloppy. I’m surprised how much the looks of Avatar: Fire and Ash have gripped me, namely Neytiri’s mourning formalities, Varang’s witchy braids with the bald spot at the front of her scalp, and the various cultural signifiers, body modifications, and tattoos of each tribe. Frankenstein deserves props for its patchwork creature design, a delicious middle ground between an art class anatomy model and an damp-hair emo sadboi. In a very different aesthetic register, I love Hamnet’s dirt and wear, and the caked-on makeup for the climactic stage performance. Further honorable mentions to the ensemble stylings of Grand Tour and One of Them Days, the glorious character accents of One Battle After Another (Perfidia’s lashes alone, my god), the nattiness of Marty Supreme, and The Smashing Machine’s conspicuous but technically skilled resculpting of The Rock’s skull and hussification of Emily Blunt.

Visual Effects

• Avatar: Fire and Ash, Jacqueline Allen, Yenney Amaro, Richard Baneham & co. – You can never really take the visual splendor and technical innovation of a James Cameron movie for granted, even when the film itself isn’t always persuasive. I continue to appreciate the narrative and thematic risks the Avatar series is taking without being swept up in them. But the ever-growing survey of Pandora’s flora and fauna are an undeniable achievement, and new creatures like the balloony messenger beasts or the demon squids are vivid additions. Familiar standbys, especially the series peaks of stellar water effects and rebel badboy Payakan, are just as inviting as before. All these effects are conjured with tactility and color, inspiring Cameron’s imagination as a director and ours as an audience.
• Mickey 17, Dan Glass, Stuart Penn & co. – Do I necessarily have strong feelings for Mickey 17? No, but all these months later and the seamless integration of its two Robert Pattinsons is still tightly gripped in my imagination. The woolly, lumbering tactility of the aliens are cute and intimidating, a nice combo that makes them visually distinctive even as they tread familiar thematic grounds. Plus, the VFX are a great ally to Fiona Crombie’s imaginative sets, with the mysterious glowing of Mickey’s regeneration pod and the roiling tundras of the ice planet those meddling Earthlings settle on. Lots to admire, and more defined than a lot of what Mickey 17 throws at us.
• Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning, John Arnitt, Stuart Heath, Stuart Leach & co. – Another franchise where, even though my baseline enthusiasm isn’t as high as other folks, I’m still very appreciative of their entertaining effects team. Tom Cruise has still not found a method grandiose enough to end his life and simultaneously preserve the cinema firmament forever, but bless him for continuing to try with stunts like freefalling into a roiling ocean until he’s rescued by a submarine. The explosions and hand-to-hand combat are precisely engineered for kinetic impact, and they’re a great time to boot.
• The Naked Gun, Tex Barnett, Jen Picard, J. D. Schwalm, etc. – So many jokes rely on excellent props and sleight-of-hand, balancing the stupidity with just enough recognizable mechanics to land as perfectly as they do. The snowman puppet alone is fabulous, as is the sequence where Frank has to escape his runaway car only to suffer a pile-on of obstacles. Maybe the best part of The Naked Gun’s effects is how many of these gags appear to arrive apropos of nothing, making the surprise part of their ingenuity. It’s not innovative per say, but it gets the job done splendidly, and I’m sure they tried to kill Tom Cruise too. 
• Resurrection, Wu Songyi, Chi-Kit, Lise Fischer, Strilen Liu – It’s very unlikely anyone involved in Resurrection tried to kill Tom Cruise, but I hope this phantasmagoria gave him hope for the barely-tapped possibilities cinema still holds. The frame story is the most forward showcase of Resurrection’s visual effects, with the giant hand swooping through the opium den and the endless mausoleum of Deliriant coffins. Those marquee effects are worth a nomination all by themselves, and even if these effects here are mostly supportive, I love the way they sustain the unique visual timbres of each chapter. Are oddities like a man crawling down a wall or a woman’s devouring of an entire apple aided by cinematic trickery, or are these home grown novelties? Do we count the melting of the candlewax structures as VFX or set design or editing, or does it fall magnificently in all categories? Resurrection knows how to blur reality, heightening the real and the unreal to the point where such distinctions barely matter.

Honorable Mentions: Final Destination: Bloodlines is the one honoree from my Fifties trio not to make the cut, and though I’m happy with my final five, the slap-happy grotesquery deserves so much love. The actual sixth spot is Superman, a colorful CGI spectacle in keeping with Gun’s visual sensibilities while looking distinct from the other comic book spectacles being released. Further mentions to the most coolest dinosaurs of Jurassic World: Rebirth, the gore enhancements and spatial breakdown of Sinners, and the weird beasts of Boys Go to Jupiter and Sister Midnight.

Song

• Highest 2 Lowest, “Trunks”, A$AP Rocky – All of these nominees have multiple songs worthy of recognition, so if you wanna consider this a Purple Rain Original Song Score lineup, so be it. I love the music across Highest 2 Lowest, and “Trunks” gets points for Spike’s staging of the song for maximum narrative impact. Yung Felun’s got talent, and David clearly vibes with his music, plus it doubles as a pretty vivid portrait of all the cards the rapper/kidnapper/prisoner has (or thinks he has) going into his one-on-one with his idol/victim/benefactor. Bonus points for getting me to listen to a lot of A$AP Rocky’s music – what a talented artist.
• KPOP Demon Hunters, “Soda Pop”, Vince, KUSH, Danny Chung – In a soundtrack of bops, “Soda Pop” translates most to me as an actual pop song, while still wielding a fairly menacing subtext to its lyrics of desire to drink up the listener via the Soja Boys’ demonic soul-snatching ambitions. It gets to be a great time, catchy as hell – befitting its use as an evil earworm – and it’s stuck with me as much as the more plot-/character-driven numbers. Gotta respect it when the boys bop it to you this hard.
• Queens of Drama, “Fistée jusqu’au couer (Fist to the Heart)”, Alexis Langlois & Pierre Desprats – The apex of a lesbian situationship defined by overwrought drama and surprisingly earnest feeling. These statements are mostly meant as neutrally as possible, though Queens of Drama has a lot of unforced lows and impressive highs, all filtered through that Altered Innocence trademark of high-saturated colors and blatant artifice organized into a semi-plausible reality. In lyrics and orchestration, the film’s cheesy emotions explode in their most poignant, muscular form. Pastiche and modernity, authenticity and selling out, closeting and indiscriminately uncontrolled self-expression, it’s all transcendentally synthesized in the name of love.
• Sinners, “Pale, Pale Moon”, Brittany Howard and Ludwig Göransson – My very favorite song in the whole film. A rowdy, libidinous party track, celebrating all the singing and sweating a body can do under the moonlight with a good drink and a good crowd before the sun comes up. The full backup chorus and lyrical references to natural pleasures are fabulous invocations to the night’s festivities, even with the undead lurking around the corner to give the tune a morbid irony. These party-goers don’t know the pain of the outside world was in this room, but for this last moment the club is bumping, the alcohol is flowing, and the women are beautiful.
• The Testament of Ann Lee, “Clothed by the Sun”, Daniel Blumberg – A rare inclusion of an end-credits song, but when it’s such a stirring summation of a moving, unusual epic, we do in fact take those! Sung not by Ann but by her brother, it turns the credits into a eulogy for this fallen religious leader. Everything heartfelt and pious about this woman, about the good people saw in her mission and the reasons they believed she chose to create this movement, is rendered with a plainspoken simplicity and somewhat otherwordly orchestrations befitting Ann and her film.

Honorable Mentions, excluding the myriad of bops from the five nominated musicals: “Fredstanker” from Sex, closing the show with a vulnerable, ridiculous, sweetly affecting bit of avant-garde nonsense. “Train Dreams” from Train Dreams, the funniest phrase to read or say out loud, is poetic and gruff in equal measure, distilling the film’s essence of displaced tenderness better than anything else.

Nomination Totals

3 – Sinners, The Testament of Ann Lee.
2 – Grand Tour, Highest 2 Lowest, One Battle After Another, Resurrection.
1 – April, Avatar: Fire and Ash, Bring Her Back, Hamnet, KPOP Demon Hunters, Marty Supreme, Mickey 17, Mission: Impossible, Peter Hujar’s Day, The Phoenician Scheme, Queens of Drama, Sex, The Ugly Stepsister, Weapons.