There’s a saying amongst Oscars Kremlinologists that the Academy doesn’t reward the very best performing—it rewards the most performing. It’s a sentiment that, no less than a part of the time, applies to the costume design class too: for voters, in terms of model on display screen, larger is normally higher. (Greater skirts, bolder colours, brasher patterns; if it makes your eyes pop, likelihood is the Academy will like it.)
Relating to costumes, although, the Academy’s favor can also be guided by one other issue: historical past. Wanting on the previous decade of nominees as a pattern, 48 out of the 50 motion pictures up for the golden statuette have been both fantasy or interval movies—the exceptions being La La Land in 2016 and All the pieces All over the place All at As soon as final 12 months, in case you have been questioning—and the entire interval movies that took the prize residence have been set no less than 50 years up to now.
This 12 months’s crop of best-costume nominees isn’t doing a lot to buck that pattern. 4 out of the 5 movies nominated function historic settings, the newest of these being Oppenheimer’s conclusion within the early Sixties, when the physicist is granted a medal by President Lyndon B. Johnson. And it’s tough to imagine that Barbie’s nomination took place for its scenes in present-day California, versus the fabulously kitschy Barbieland confections dreamed up by costume designer Jacqueline Durran (who truly received her second best-costume Oscar in 2020 for Greta Gerwig’s earlier movie, Little Girls—set within the late nineteenth century).
