THE VFX CATEGORY IS A SAFE HAVEN for big-budget projects like No Time to Die and Spider-Man: No Way Home, which some suggested could have been Best Picture contenders. They fell short there, but along with Dune they helped give Best Visual Effects by far the highest gross of any Oscar category. Marvel Studios is represented with the superhero romp Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, but the company’s losing streak in this category has lasted for more than 10 nominations.
DUNE, Paul Lambert, Tristan Myles, Brian Connor and Gerd Nefzer
Director Kenneth Branagh told his sound team that, as a child in Northern Ireland, the sound of a violent mob approaching his street sounded to him like a swarm of bees. “We did experiment with a swarm of bees in the sound mix, but it really didn’t work,” said re-recording mixer and sound supervisor Simon Chase of that moment, which is recreated in the opening of Branagh’s autobiographical film. Instead, the team settled on the audio of an oncoming train, recorded in London. “Ken didn’t mind that it wasn’t the right train horn or whatever,” re-recording mixer Niv Adiri said. “It felt right to him.”
FREE GUY, Swen Gillberg, Bryan Grill, Nikos Kalaitzidis and Dan Sudick
What sound does sand make? That was one of the challenges for supervising sound editors Mark Mangini and Theo Green, who buried microphones in the desert and pulled them through the grains in order to simulate the noise giant sandworms make. “Then we’d bring that little sound back to the studio and magnify it into the sound of a 400-meter worm traveling underneath you,” Mangini said. And in order to capture the audible energy of super-valuable “spice” in the ground, the sound guys turned to the cereal aisle of the grocery store: They recorded themselves walking over sand that had been mixed with Rice Krispies.
NO TIME TO DIE, Charlie Noble, Joel Green, Jonathan Fawkner and Chris Corbould
In 60 years of James Bond movies, the franchise has only won five Oscars, the first of which was a Best Sound Editing award for 1964’s Goldfinger. (It was a prize that Skyfall also scored in 2013, in a rare Oscar tie with Zero Dark Thirty.) For this 25th Bond adventure, the sound designers and editors were tasked with layering multiple tracks to increase the tension for an elaborate scene in the fog-draped woods, as bad guys on motorbikes circle 007 like sharks, while in other scenes, lovingly threading Hans Zimmer’s beauty of a Bond redux score into the action.
SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS, Christopher Townsend, Joe Farrell, Sean Noel Walker and Dan Oliver
The wind whistles through the cracks of a big wooden house in The Power of the Dog, a startling metaphor for what’s happening to several of the movie’s repressed, lonely characters. And that sound of desolation and yearning was manifested by production sound mixer Richard Flynn (Top of the Lake) and his collaborators—not just in that howling wind but via the creaking of floorboards, the tugging of rawhide ropes and the incessant clicking of the teeth on a black comb.
SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME, Kelly Port, Chris Waegner, Scott Edelstein and Dan Sudick
In the last two decades, musicals or music-adjacent movies have won for sound six times (Chicago, Ray, Dreamgirls, Les Misérables, Whiplash, Bohemian Rhapsody). And though the singing in West Side Story was not all recorded live on the set, the sound team’s job was to seamlessly transition into and out of songs. Industry legend Gary Rydstrom has been nominated 19 times, while Andy Nelson now has a record 22 sound nominations, third most among all living persons.
Steve’s Perspective
It’s pretty much a given that if there’s a Best Picture nominee in this category, it will win. Exception: 2015, when the (relatively) low-budget Ex Machina somehow beat Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian and The Revenant. But that was really the only recent surprise here, and there’s no reason to think that Dune won’t uphold the status quo with ease—unless Oscar voters decide they simply must give something to the year’s only true blockbuster, Spider-Man.
