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Voting on nominations will take place from January 11 to 16, 2024, and the official Oscar nominations will be announced on January 23, 2024. Final voting will take place from February 22 to 27, 2024. And finally, the broadcast The 96th Oscar television series will air on Sunday, March 10, and will air. live on ABC at 8 pm ET/ 5 pm PT. We update predictions throughout awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all of our 2024 Oscars picks.
The state of the race
“Oppenheimer,” the explosive Oscar sound favorite, received the biggest boost from The Motion Picture Sound Editors and The Cinema Audio Society guilds. The MPSE awarded Christopher Nolan’s historical thriller about “The Father of the Atomic Bomb” all three nominations: ADR, Effects/Foley and Music Editing, while the CAS sound mixers nominated “Oppenheimer” for its top Film award –Live Action. The 71st MPSE Golden Reel Awards will take place on March 3 at the Wilshire Ebell Theater in Los Angeles, and the 60th CAS Awards will take place on March 2 at the Beverly Hilton.
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“Oppenheimer“ was one of 10 films that made the Oscar shortlist for Best Sound, prior to the nomination announcement on January 23. Among the other shortlisted contenders, “Barbie“ (ADR, Musical Edition) “Teacher“ (ADR, music editing) and “Napoleon” (ADR, effects/Foley) received two MPSE nominations, while “Ferrari“ (Effects/Foley), “The Killer“ (Effects/Foley), “Killers of the Flower Moon“ (ADR) and “The Zone of Interest” (foreign language) received one.
In terms of CAS, the other nominations are “Barbie,” “Ferrari,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and “Maestro.”
For “Oppenheimer” (Universal), Nolan once again turned to his Oscar-winning sound editor and sound designer, Richard King (“Dunkirk,” “Inception,” “The Dark Knight,” “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” ) to lead the expansive sound design. This included Trinity’s test explosion, which sounded like a cosmic door slamming, as well as subatomic particles and waves and the cosmic black hole, all manipulated by natural sound effects. Also on the team were Oscar-winning music and sound effects mixer Kevin O’Connell (“Hacksaw Ridge”) and dialogue mixer Gary Rizzo (“Dunkirk,” “Inception”).
Greta Gerwig’s billion-dollar blockbuster “Barbie” (Warner Bros.) achieved a unique artificial sound for the plastic Barbie Land, directed by Oscar-nominated supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer Ai-Ling Lee (“First Man,” “La La Land”), sound designer/supervising sound editor Dan Kenyon and O’Connell. A sense of imitated reality was achieved using vocal sounds, toys and musical instruments. Sonically, it was like classic Disney animation meets a 1950s Hollywood musical.
On “Maestro” (Netflix), Bradley Cooper hired sound designer/supervising sound editor King and Oscar-nominated production sound mixer Steve Morrow (who worked with him on creating a live Dolby Atmos mix for “Maestro”). A Star Is Born”) to create a soundscape of this complicated love story between legendary director and composer Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and his wife, actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), spanning more than four decades (with first half in black and white and the second half in color). ). It’s about the sound of Bernstein’s musical orbit, and the challenge was to do it all live as if we were in the middle of the orchestra or among the people at a party. It’s an immersive achievement that doesn’t feel staged, and Dolby Atmos is powerful. Bernstein’s passionate conducting of Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”) at Ely Cathedral in London is the emotional highlight.
David Fincher’s passion project, “The Killer” (Netflix), based on the graphic novel by Alex Nolent, finds Michael Fassbender’s patient, meticulous killer making a rare mistake and then having to step out of his comfort zone to clean up the mess. disaster. Ren Klyce, nine-time Oscar nominee, sound designer, supervising sound editor and sound mixer (including “Fight Club”) takes us inside the mind of the Killer over six chapters that take place in Paris, Republic Dominican, New Orleans, Florida, New York and Chicago. Each has their distinctive soundscape in this journey from nihilism to care that makes particular use of a mantra voiceover, their personal mix of playing (The Smiths), a score by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor that occupies the upper registers and lower, and a Surround Sound Mix which is like connecting a microphone to the camera so you can hear everything around you.
Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” (A24), the acclaimed Holocaust drama about the banality of evil, features an appropriately disturbing soundscape by sound designer and re-recording mixer Johnnie Burn. Loosely based on the novel by Martin Amis, it explores the real life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller), an avid gardener, as they try to build a dream life with their family in the surrounding countryside along to the camp. Burn (who meticulously researched Auschwitz) treated it like the soundscape of a horror film, funneling sound into our ears to paint images in our heads, and it was the most violent film he had ever worked on. The result was a contrast between nature and the mechanical environment, punctuated by the sounds of atrocities and screams within the camp.
“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” (Paramount), from producer-star Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie, contained a more intimate and visceral sonic approach to Ethan Hunt’s (Cruise) high-octane adventure to thwart a threat. global AI. Directed by supervising sound editor James Mather and re-recording mixers Chris Burdon and Mark Taylor (Oscar winners for “Top Gun: Maverick”), highlights include the brutal Venice alley fight between Hunt and Pom Klementieff’s The French Assassin, Paris, the wild car chase in Rome, where Ethan and Grace (Haley Atwell) take on a giant Hummer in a tiny Fiat, and the kitchen scene during the final train crash, when the Orient Express falls off a broken bridge. one car at a time. Each sound was isolated and experienced.
Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” (Apple TV+/Paramount), about the systematic murders of members of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma during the 1920s after oil was discovered on their land, captures the culture of the people natives. This is part of the soundscape strategy of contrasting beauty and evil, led by Oscar-winning supervising sound editor Philip Stocktock (“Hugo”), Oscar-winning production sound mixer Mark Ulano (“Titanic ”) and the Oscar-winning rerecording. mixer Tom Fleishman (“Hugo”). Throughout, there is tribal music, especially recurring drums that create tension, as well as traditional dances and spoken language, and the soundscape had to have the correct and proportionate intonation.
For Michael Mann’s biopic “Ferrari” (Neon), starring Adam Driver, the sound team of sound designer/rerecording mixer Tony Lamberti, sound designer Bernard Weiser, Oscar-winning sound mixer Lee Orloff and the Oscar-winning re-recording mixer. Andy Nelson recreated the sounds of 1950s Ferrari cars and their unique noises, from induction to transmission to exhaust. They sourced real Italian cars to re-record the engine sounds and captured the sound of the cars on race tracks in the middle of nowhere in the UK to eliminate any ambient sounds.
Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” (Apple TV+/Sony Pictures) traces the rapid rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix), from military leader to Emperor, driven by his obsessive love for his wife, Empress Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby). The emphasis on soundscape, led by Oscar-nominated supervising sound designers/sound editors Oliver Tarney and James Harrison (“No Time to Die”), production sound mixer Stephane Bucher (Oscar nominee “The Last Duel”) and the re- Recording mixers Massey and William Miller (“Oscar-nominated News of the World”) are in the six legendary battles (each with distinctive geometric designs).
“The Creator” by Gareth Edwards (20th Century/Disney), the sci-fi action film about a war between humanity and AI, contains a haunting soundscape of gunshots, explosions, robotics and the atmosphere of Southeast Asia, directed by supervising sound editors. Erik Aadahl (Oscar nominee “A Quiet Place”) and Ethan Van Der Ryn (Oscar winner “King Kong” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”).
Pioneers
“Barbie”
“Ferrari”
“Teacher”
“Oppenheimer”
“The Zone of Interest”
Contenders
“The creator”
“The murderer”
“Flower Moon Killers”
“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One”
“Napoleon”
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