Oscar Nominations: At Least One Surprise

The Academy Awards go one smarter than BAFTA by including the late Eiko Ishioka for Mirror, Mirror in their Best Costume Design nominees. Otherwise it is business as usual for all the big hitters. However one other costume designer on this list especially deserves her statuette (clue: amazingly she has never been nominated before)…

Anna Karenina – Jacqueline Durran

Les Misérables – Paco Delgado

Lincoln – Joanna Johnston

Mirror, Mirror – Eiko Ishioka

Snow White and the Huntsman – Colleen Atwood

Django Unchained: Where on earth is Sharen Davis..?

We have already covered the issue of only big name, big budget period and fantasy films getting a look-in for Costume Design awards HERE; our response to BAFTA’s own commendable but safe list of nominees announced yesterday. Yet it is worth reiterating again that costume design is not always about display and certainly not scale. Priority number one: serve the narrative, which can be achieved a number of ways. Case in point, Inglourious Basterds (2009) features some of the most subtly effective costume design in recent years. Was costume designer Anna B. Sheppard nominated for anything major? Of course not.

Still, best of luck to the Oscar nominees. We’ll have our fingers crossed for one new member in particular. Sorry Sharen Davis (Django Unchained), Lindy Hemming (The Dark Knight Rises) and Mark Bridges (The Master) – you should have been there. Incidentally this goes to show that you should not believe everything you read. We did not run that inane Variety story about Sharen Davis’ ‘leaked’ nomination a few days back because we knew it was nonsense (and guys those costume sketches are not ‘exclusive’ when we published them a week before). Unfortunately we were right.

The 85th Oscar Academy Awards will take place on Sunday 24th February.

You can watch Lily Collins in Mirror Mirror at LOVEFiLM.com.