Best Film Editing is quite the important category when it comes to predicting the Best Picture winner (read more about why right here) and the American Cinema Editors’ ACE Eddie Awards are a good way to begin evaluating the category and today they announced their 2012 nominees and there are certainly some things to discuss.
In 2006-2008, before the Academy began nominating ten films for Best Picture, only three films — The Reader (2008), Atonement (2007) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) — were nominated for Best Picture that were not nominated by the American Cinema Editors. When the Academy bumped it up to ten nominees over the last two years only three films each year missed the cut, which is saying something considering only 13 films are nominated in three different categories each year.
So what will this year’s crop of contenders tell us? After all, aren’t most prognosticators expecting 7-8 Best Picture nominees as the Academy has left the official number up in the air?
This year, of the five films nominated for Best Edited Feature Film (Dramatic), four are already among my top Best Picture contenders, including War Horse, which had been slipping as of late. The fifth film among the bunch is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which recently earned a major bump when David Fincher was nominated by the Directors Guild. Is this the final sign we needed to consider the film a major contender for a Best Picture nomination? Is the nomination for War Horse enough for us to keep it in the conversation? And what about Bridesmaids?
Yup, Bridesmaids gets another bump as well as it is among the five nominees for Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy or Musical) along with anticipated Best Picture nominees The Artist and Midnight in Paris.
So I guess one way to look at this is to say if you take the six films I already have in my Best Picture predictions — The Descendants, Hugo, Moneyball, War Horse, The Artist and Midnight in Paris — all you need to do is decide between The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Bridesmaids and you have seven, the same number of Eddie nominees that made the Best Picture cut the last two years. Of course, that’s a little too scientific, but who knows, it just might work.
Moving away from Best Picture talk for a second, I recently unveiled my first batch of predictions for Best Editing at the Oscars and only one film not nominated by the Cinema Editors was on my list, that film being Drive, edited by Matthew Newman. The other four films I included in my top five were The Artist, Hugo, War Horse and The Descendants. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was on my bubble line at #6 and Moneyball was at the bottom at #12. I will be updating those predictions soon along with my Best Picture predictions, but if you’d like to see them now you can click here.
Winners of the 2012 ACE Eddie Awards will be revealed on Saturday, February 18, 2012 in the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel. The ceremony will be hosted by actor/comedian Patton Oswalt.
I have included all 13 nominees in three feature film categories directly below. Do you notice anything I forgot to mention?
BEST EDITED FEATURE FILM (DRAMATIC):
- The Descendants (Kevin Tent, A.C.E.)
- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Angus Wall, A.C.E. and Kirk Baxter, A.C.E.)
- Hugo (Thelma Schoonmaker, A.C.E.)
- Moneyball (Christopher Tellefsen, A.C.E.)
- War Horse (Michael Kahn, A.C.E.)
BEST EDITED FEATURE FILM (COMEDY OR MUSICAL):
- The Artist (Anne-Sophie Bion and Michel Hazanavicius )
- Bridesmaids (William Kerr and Michael L. Sale)
- Midnight in Paris (Alisa Lepselter)
- My Week with Marilyn (Adam Recht)
- Young Adult (Dana E. Glauberman, A.C.E.)
BEST EDITED ANIMATED FEATURE FILM:
- The Adventures of Tintin (Michael Kahn, A.C.E.)
- Puss in Boots (Eric Dapkewicz)
- Rango (Craig Wood, A.C.E.)
