Oscars Best Sound overview: Big and bombastic are the name of the game
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To many people – and that includes many academy members – there might be something esoteric about the Best Sound category at the Oscars. And yet it might be one of the most important technical crafts involved with filmmaking. If you don’t understand what the actors are saying, then it’s harder to connect with them or what the filmmaker was trying to achieve. A movie’s score and sound effects also need to be properly recorded and balanced to make any film as much a sonic experience as a visual one.
There are also useful precursors for the category, such as the Cinema Audio Society Awards and the Motion Picture Sound Editors’ Golden Reel Awards, which give a clearer picture of which of the five Oscar nominees are considered the best by their direct peers.
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As with some of the other below-the-line crafts categories, this doesn’t always have a direct correlation with Best Picture, and it will be voted on by the entire academy, so those voters without hands-on expertise have just as much say. There’s a long-standing tradition of the loudest movies tending to win. But it’s only been a few years since Sound Editing and Sound Mixing were combined into one category, so it may be too early to identify clear trends.
This year’s category certainly has a number of loud movies, but it also includes one musical biopic, which is another film genre that does well in the Sound category.
“All Quiet on the Western Front”- Viktor Prášil, Frank Kruse, Markus Stemler, Lars Ginzel, and Stefan Korte
In many ways, this might be seen as an outlier since the mostly European sound team is made up entirely of first-time nominees, which tells you that the academy’s sound branch nominated it on its sonic merits alone. Although Edward Berger‘s anti-war drama, adapted from a classic piece of German literature about WWI, hasn’t gotten nearly the theatrical release of the other four nominees, the work by the sound team is undeniable to anyone who had the fortune of watching it in a theater rather than merely streaming on Netflix (or the academy’s own streaming platform).
War movies have always done well in the sound category, from “Saving Private Ryan” to “Black Hawk Down,” “The Hurt Locker,” “Letters from Iwo Jima,” and “Hacksaw Ridge.” As with those other films, the team on Berger’s epic had to create or enhance all the explosions and gunfire to make the harrowing war scenes even more authentic, which makes this one of two favorites in the category.
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“Avatar: The Way of Water”- Julian Howarth, Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, Dick Bernstein, Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, and Michael Hedges
One of two straight sequels nominated in the Sound category, “The Way of Water” follows James Cameron‘s 2009 sci-fi fantasy epic which received nine Oscar nominations (including for both Sound Mixing and Sound Editing) and won three, though not for sound. As much as “Avatar” is clearly a visual spectacle that’s very likely to win Best Visual Effects, the sound work is a little more subtle, with plenty of effects involved while the team also needed to make sure that the dialogue (either from set or ADR) could stand up to everything going on around the characters, including lots of splashing water.
“The Batman”- Stuart Wilson, William Files, Douglas Murray, and Andy Nelson
Although many superhero movies are released each and every year, they don’t always stand out enough to get noticed by the academy’s sound branch, who previously nominated “Joker” and “Black Panther.” Both of those movies also received Best Picture nominations, which wasn’t the case with “The Batman”– the only movie in this category not nominated for Picture. But you have to give credit to Matt Reeves‘s sound team, who managed to capture or create every “Biff!” “Bang!” and “Pow!” to make the action scenes even more vibrant and exciting.
It certainly doesn’t hurt that he had 24-time (!) nominee Andy Nelson (two of those nominations this year alone) as re-recording mixer and seven-time nominee Stuart Wilson (and winner for “1917”) mixing the sound, joined by two first-time nominees. There’s a good reason why you see a lot of the same names being nominated in this category each year, and that’s because these are some of the very best in the business, who make “The Batman” just as exciting sonically as it is visually.
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“Elvis”- David Lee, Wayne Pashley, Andy Nelson, and Michael Keller
The only music-driven film in the mix this year, Baz Lurhmann‘s Elvis Presley biopic has received a lot of love from the academy’s crafts members, and is one of the four movies in this category with a Best Picture nomination. Like the other four films in this race, it was nominated for the CAS award, but it lost to “Top Gun: Maverick.”
Re-recording mixer Andy Nelson (who also worked on “The Fabelmans” and “Babylon” last year) is the most prominent member of this team as well with his 24 Oscar nominations going back to 1989, including two wins for Steven Spielberg‘s “Saving Private Ryan” and the musical “Les Misérables.” Sound recordist David Lee is also a previous Oscar winner for “The Matrix,” while sound designer Pashley and re-recording mixer Keller are both first-time nominees.
The fact is that you can’t watch a movie like “Elvis” and not be impressed with the way the music is mixed in comparison to all the dialogue, as well as how different genres of music were edited together with Presley classics. There’s a very good reason why Luhrmann’s film is another one of this year’s below-the-line standouts with six nominations there, only missing out on Visual Effects, and the sound plays a large role on Lurhmann’s team.
“Top Gun: Maverick”- Mark Weingarten, James H. Mather, Al Nelson, Chris Burdon, and Mark Taylor
The sound team behind Tom Cruise‘s action sequel includes previous Oscar winners and nominees, including two five-time nominees: re-recording engineer Mark Taylor, who won his first Oscar for “1917” just a few years back, and sound mixer Mark Weingarten, who won his Oscar for “Dunkirk.” (Weingarten also was a credited mixer on “Avatar: The Way of Water,” though he wasn’t included as part of that film’s nominated sound team.) This is Mather’s second Oscar nomination, as well as Burdon’s, which just leaves sound designer Al Nelson as the only first-time nominee on the team.
The work of capturing and creating all the fighter jet sounds and explosions and mixing them with the dialogue and score puts this in an interesting position midway between war movie and something like 2019 Sound Editing winner “Ford v. Ferrari.” Combining Sound Mixing with Sound Editing puts Oscar voters in a tough spot, because maybe they prefer the sound effects from one movie but the mixing in another. “Top Gun: Maverick” certainly seems like the best of both worlds, and being such a big and popular movie, it could win just by the nature of it being seen by the most voters.
Incidentally, the sound mixers from “Top Gun” won the CAS Award this past weekend (over the other four nominees in this category) following its Golden Reel win, putting it in a good position against its main competition, “All Quiet.”
Gold Derby Experts and Users alike have “Top Gun: Maverick” winning Sound handily, though the margin between Editors is slightly smaller. That said, this category could still go to “All Quiet.” Throw a coin in the air, call heads or tails, and you probably have a 50-50 chance of being right in this category.
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