American Hustle Gravity The Great Gatsby Her 12 Years a Slave As with Best Costume Design, the usual rule of thumb with Best Production Design is the more noticeable the production and sets are, the more likely it is to win, and this rule doesn't fail very often. By this reasoning, as with Costume, the likely winner should be Catherine Martin's ostentatious and CGI-assisted work in The Great Gatsby, but unlike the competition for the best wears, I really don't see any play for an upset from any of the other four nominees. American Hustle, the film that I think could surprise in Best Costume Design, has some rather impressive 1970's style décor and architecture, but they don't quite pop out at you like the film's costumes and are not as thematically integral to the narrative. Plus, from some of the more uniformed members of the Academy, they may think the crew just stumbled upon places that still happened to be decorated like the 1970's and hold this against the nomination. The most encouraging nomination of the bunch was K.K. Barrett's tremendous near-future production design in Her, which was honestly my favorite element of the film and plays a huge role in the success of the film's narrative. Despite the buzz among cinephiles over Barrett's work though, the Academy rarely nominates anything with even the slightest whiff of contemporary to it in this category much less reward it the Oscar, but I guess you never know. As for the other two contenders, the work in Gravity is pretty fantastic, but it's also sparse, so unless the Academy is in the mood to hand Gravity every technical award in sight, I doubt it takes this category. 12 Years a Slave has the whole historical thing going for it, but the film's sets are a bit too drab to win in this category. We comeback then to one film that seems inevitable in this category: The Great Gatsby. As ecstatic as I would be if Her somehow managed to pull off the upset, The Great Gatsby is a deserving winner as well, and it is absolutely the correct choice to make for your pool. Will Win: The Great GatsbyCould Win: HerShould Win: Her
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
