5. Best Film Editing - Joe Walker
It shouldnt come as too much of a surprise that 12 Twelve Years A Slave covers a time frame of roughly 12 years. Keeping this shocking story from getting bloated is a pretty tough feat which is largely accomplished with a fair running time just over 2 hours, but the entire execution along the journey is remarkable too. Watching 12 Years A Slave can often feel as if youre going from abusive sequence to abusive sequence with no sense of time at all, almost as if youre just watching events in a blur. The pacing is relentless and never even gives you a chance to assess whether youre in year 1 or year 7, and its something that most definitely feels intentional because the point is that it doesnt matter; all 12 years were brutal. You can make estimated assumptions though by observing the surroundings and various plot points but for the most part, the film is relentless in its horror.