Oscars 101: Best Sound Editing

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.

Yesterday's Best Film Editing installment of this series allows us the perfect segue from the purely visual to the purely aural.  While Film Editing is notoriously hard to predict with the limited amount of information that we, as the outside viewer, is privy to, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing are perhaps the two most confusing categories of the entire awards show.

On the surface, they appear to be awarding the exact same thing.  I mean, what's really the difference between mixing and editing?  Put simply, Sound Editing is when you string together a series of pre-existing sounds in the same way that Film Editing strings together a series of pre-existing shots.  Sound Mixing is when several unique sounds are combined together to create a completely different effect.  It's a pretty fine line, to be sure, but is nevertheless one that separates two very different types of skills that are too often dismissed as "technical garbage."

This year's Best Sound Editing nominees are:
American Sniper
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies
Interstellar
Unbroken

American Sniper - Gunfire, explosions and swashbuckling are generally what gains notice in this category, so it should come as no surprise why American Sniper earned a nomination here.  Given its titular protagonist's deadly purpose in the Middle East, there's plenty of sounds strung together to choose from.  Not just gunshots, but the whole cacophony of modern warfare, from jets to humvees.

But for as excellent as its chances are of winning, it suffers from being too similar to fellow nominee Unbroken: covering the same range of martial sound effects.  In all likelihood, the two films will split the vote, leaving neither with enough to win the award.  Its only chance is for like-minded voters within the Academy to pool their numbers together for a single nominee.  But whether that would end up being American Sniper or Unbroken is anybody's guess.

Birdman - In a lot of ways, Birdman's nomination feels like an apologist offering for its ineligibility in Best Original Score.  That's obviously not the case, but it somehow feels like it.  But its combination of classical music cues (the reason for its Original Score ineligibility), jazzy drum solos and psychotically induced explosions offer a wide range of aural samples for voters to parse through and admire.

The film benefits from the absence of what I thought would be an incredibly likely candidate for this category: Whiplash.  Both share the same jazzy score and audio samplings (of which Whiplash outpaces Birdman, even if Birdman offers a wider variety of sounds to choose from).  With Whiplash out of the picture, any Academy member looking to award realism over fantasy has only one film to turn to.

The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies - The Academy has been far less than kind to the final installment of Peter Jackson's erroneously stretch-out Hobbit trilogy.  It's not without reason, to be sure.  It's not even all that unexpected.  But as its single nomination among twenty-four categories, any sympathetic voter only has this one chance to acknowledge the film.

Beyond the sympathies of some closet nerds, The Battle of Five Armies does offer a very different sound pallet from its fellow nominees.  For one, it is the only one to choose arrows over bullets, swords over explosions and bellowing roars over screeching engines.  And those sounds it likewise has in spades: several hours of constant battle to show off the film's auditory prowess.

Interstellar - Like The Battle of Five Armies, Interstellar will appeal to "genre" enthusiasts.  As the only science fiction film among the nominees, its sound pallet is almost as unique as its fantastical competitor, and its multiplicity of settings allows it to fully explore the auditory possibilities of its genre.

That being said, while broadly conceived and filling a unique niche in the category, it's not nearly as exceptional as many of the other nominees.  In particular, this includes American Sniper and Birdman.  It also doesn't stand out as starkly from the competition as The Hobbit does, ultimately making it a fairly easy choice to pass over.

Unbroken - All things being equal, I'm surprised that Unbroken was nominated for any Oscars, even if only a few technical ones.  That's not because it was a bad film by any means, because it wasn't.  It was just so unexceptional in so many ways that it could hardly be considered the best of anything.

That being said, this type of film - with its myriad of martial sound effects - does tend to get Academy recognition.  And many voters who are feeling especially patriotic, but looking to shy away from the inexplicable controversy surrounding American Sniper, might find Unbroken to be a more suitable choice.  However, it is in every respect a worse version of American Sniper that will, at best, lose to it in a head-to-head confrontation and will, at worst, split the vote between them, ensuring that neither film wins the day.

Safe Bet: Birdman

Long Shot: American Sniper

Longer Shot: The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies

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