David Fincher's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is cold and dark, chilly and kinky; it's a virtuoso thriller in which sound plays a key role in ratcheting up the tension and keeping the audience uneasy as the main characters struggle to solve a decades-old crime.

Re-recording mixer Michael Semanick received his ninth Oscar nomination for the film, his fifth movie with Fincher. His other work includes the "There Will Be Blood," "WALL-E" and the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, for which he won one of his two Oscars. (The other came for Peter Jackson's "King Kong.")

What were...

Sound re-recording mixer Greg P. Russell may be a name few moviegoers -- or even many Academy members -- know. But with more than 185 films to his credit and more than a dozen Oscar nominations, he has worked with some of the biggest directors in Hollywood.

Russell picked up his 15th Oscar nod this year for Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.” With a worldwide gross of more than $1.1 billion, Bay's film ranks fourth after "Avatar," "Titanic" and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2." Russell and Bay have collaborated on eight films, with six nominations for sound mixing. But so far the director's action...