Best of 2013: Film Editing & Sound

Three categories down, 14 more to go. This can't possibly end badly.

Best Film Editing

• Joe Walker for 12 Years a Slave, for sheer clarity of experience and emotion, the compact narrative beats and obscure passing of time heightening the urgency of Solomon's horrifying plight while allowing room for its sobering patches of hesitations and revolving evocation of a specific place in history.

• Annette Dutertre for Bastards, for weaving intricate strands of constricting narrative threads and elusive character motivations/perspectives, and for always finding new ways to keep Denis's typically elliptical style suggestive yet haunted by queasy premonitions and devastating reveals.

• Sarah Flack for The Bling Ring, for sustaining wizardly control over Coppola's dizzying rhythms, patterns, and individual panics, characteristics and connections of her privileged, seemingly consequence-free group of adolescent thieves.

• Roderick Jaynes for Inside Llewyn Davis, for deploying its deceptive, ingeniously conceived two-ply structure with the doleful, dark-circled finesse of a richly textured folk song, the chilly longueurs and daily circumstances of Llewyn's life enriching one another so gracefully.

• Roger Barton & Matt Cheese for World War Z, for making those elaborate action setpieces brutal and expansive in scope, pardoning the cobbled-together structure with palpable tension, restless pacing, and surprising stakes.

Honorable Mentions begin with Pete Beaudreau for All is Lost and Gordon Grinberg & Alexandre Moors for Blue Caprice who are all so crucial to nurturing their films' most compelling moods and moments, steeping them in physical and psychological immersion, respectively; Adam Nielsen for A Hijacking and
Christopher Rouse for Captain Phillips, both of whom tackle thematically opposite Somali pirate films, but skillfully juggle airtight precision and emotional and political implications; Douglas Crise for Spring Breakers' most potent and hypnotic sequences, deep-sea-diving into the strange but specific world that Debie creates in his images; AJ Edwards, Keith Fraase, Shane Hazen, Christopher Roldan & Mark Yoshikawa for To the Wonder, accumulating Malick's more "minor" ideas/concepts and dilating them into a singular, restless, geographically expansive and deeply personal tale of decaying relationships, despite the occasional ineloquent passage; and Jennifer Lame for injecting Frances Ha with clever, thoughtfully assembled comedic beats and uncontainable bouts of energy that help to layer a frustrating but lovable protagonist. 

I also admired various aspects of Antiviral, Gravity, Museum Hours, The Selfish Giant, and Upstream Color's cutting, but I have to start drawing the line somewhere. Great year for this category. (I don't know who I'd choose if I included winners on these lists, honestly. All so good!)

Best Sound (Mixing & Editing)

• Steve Boedecker, Richard Hymns, et. al. for All is Lost, for keeping the film captivating and aurally trenchant as it summons everything from the tranquil but increasingly hazardous lapping water to the mundane sounds of clanking metal and flapping sails to intensify life-or-death situations.

• Joakim Sunstrom, et. al. for Berberian Sound Studio, for deliciously playing its concept to the rafters and delivering on the ambiguous taste-testing of gruesome and euphonious sounds of gushing, stabbing, screaming and gouging, alike.

• Skip Lievsay, et. al. for Inside Llewyn Davis, for allowing the soundtrack to evoke the Coens' specific vision of 1960s Greenwich Village, while also exhibiting the directing duo's flair for artful proficiency and memorable sonic motifs, and for Isaac's beginning/ending ballads.

• Benjamin Burger, Erik Branting, et. al. for Mother of George, for capturing the aural sensibilities of the local rhythms, textures and traditions of the central couple's community with tact and piquant cultural estrangement.

• Aaron Glasscock, et. al. for Spring Breakers, for transcending the film beyond its surface-level squalor and delivering a mystical synthesis of pop, electronica and internal monologues that take a life of their own.

I understand and find value in the reasons that AMPAS separates the two categories (Editing being the creation of aural elements and Mixing being the finished soundscape (i.e. music and dialogue mixed together), but I like to recognize all aspects of the sound as used in the final film with my awards.

Honorable Mentions are led by the equally essential sonic textures showcased in Gravity and World War Z, both of which feel insane to leave out of the top 5 considering how the contributions of the sound teams are partially imperative in making these films the spectacles that they are. A few rungs down on the list of expected Best Sound nominees include the constantly shapeshifting work in the fishing industry documentary, Leviathan, which is arguably more interesting than the previous honorable mentions from an aural standpoint, but, regardless, is still a wonder of odd and rigorous sensory immersion; Upstream Color which employs the same level of Carruthian mystery/profundity/indiscernibility in its aural concepts as it does in its visual concepts, enabling the film's uniquely warped consistency; and, weirdly enough, The Conjuring, along with other films of its generic ilk, are regularly excluded from recognition in this category, despite managing a number of relentless, head-swerving techniques of suggesting tension and terror. I did enjoy the "louder" aural elements of other big movies outside of Gravity and World War Z, such as Captain Phillips, Iron Man Three, Man of Steel, and Star Trek Into Darkness, but none of those quite reached the heights of the other Honorable Mentions for me.