It's history time, kids! Gather round. Did you know that The Elephant Man, currently on Broadway with Bradley Cooper, is indirectly responsible for the Academy's makeup Oscar? No, not that kind of make up Oscar ... though the Academy gives those all the time, too (why, hello Ms. Julianne Moore "Ms. February 2015"!) and maybe Bradley Cooper will get one of those someday?
what's that? u think this intro was an excuse to post a photo of shirtless Bra---FINE! don't judge.
I digress. In the stage version of The Elephant Man the lead actor traditionally performs while wearing no special makeup; he merely acts deformity. But that stylization hasn't yet been tried on film. When it came time to make the film version in 1980, David Lynch, no stranger to depicting deformity without prosthetics -- deformity of the soul at least -- opted for makeup effects. People bitched about the lack of Oscar recognition since The Elephant Man was an Oscar hit (8 nominations) and the very next year we had our category! Unfortunately for the The Elephant Man's team Christopher Tucker and Wally Schneiderman and all, it was too late. Those makeup artists never won a Makeup Oscar or even the other kind of Make up Oscar for overdue peeps.
Once there was an official category a young pony-tailed prosthetics genius named Rick Baker immediately began his relentless reign, hogging 11 nominations and 7 statues starting with An American Werewolf in London. The Makeup prize continued on its weirdly lyncathropic, excruciatingly unstable number of nominee (0,2,3,4) effects-obsessed path for decades thereafter.
Just two years ago the category had brief cosmetic surgery, being renamed "Makeup and Hairstyling" in time for those tea-dipped ratty-ass wigs and prosthetic scar-inducing lice-killing buzz cuts in Les Misérables (2012) to win the gold. But there's still only 3 nominees each year despite every single live-action film using Makeup and Hairstyling which is more than can be said for Original Song (which, like makeup, has had freakish difficulty sticking to a standard number of nominees, though rule changes after that weird 2 nominee year in 2011 have all but guaranteed 5 nominations moving forward) or for the Visual Effects category which was expanded to five nominees permanently in 2010.
Why do makeup artists and hairstylists only get 3 nomination slots a year despite being employed on every film set? That is for the Academy to answer. Sadly, when it comes to this category, in almost every single calendar you're willing to look at, the questions are so endless that that bigger question is never answered. But one of the questions I won't be asking this year is "why no Hobbit?" because I'm so freaking sick of those films hogging spots in Oscar races.
This Year's Seven Finalists for Three Slots
- The Amazing Spider-Man 2
- Foxcatcher
- The Grand Budapest Hotel
- Guardians of the Galaxy
- Maleficent
- Noah
- The Theory of Everything
Seven Questions (Among Many More) That This List Raises
1. Why is Spider-Man 2 here when a) so many people hate the movie and b) the internet made fun of how Electro looked?
2. Why is Into the Woods not here when Meryl Streep's Witch starts so damn fugly fierce and ends up so foxy fabulous a large part of which happens through the hair and makeup teams?
3. Why do prosthetic effects that are used to make men look less attractive (like in Foxcatcher) always make it into the mix but when prosthetics are used to make women less attractive (see: The Hours, Monster, and soon Cake) the makeup branch NEVER cares and the actress gets all the credit for her "brave" "transformation"? I find this genuinely puzzling but only The Film Experience ever vocalizes this puzzlement. Join us in puzzling over it!
4. I actually like Noah but I'm trying to remember much in the way of makeup and hair stuff here -- is this for Anthony Hopkins ancient Methusaleh? I'll give you that he looked a million times better than other ancient people in movies like -- LOL, remember Guy Pierce in Prometheus. That was... unfortunate. 90 year old actors need work too, Hollywood? It's not like Pierce sold any tickets.
5. They used to eliminate movies from contention because they had too much computer help (that was the excuse on Nicole Kidman's nose in The Hours) which is hilarious now in retrospect since it's impossible to know where the computer stuff is ending on these things and where makeup is happening (Spider-Man 2!)
6. Why am I so alone in feeling that Angelina Jolie needed zero help from Maleficent's makeup department to look that cartoonish?
7. Why is The Theory of Everything here when... ? Well... I have to share this tweet because it amuses so...
Everyone in The Theory of Everything gets older except for Felicity Jones, who mostly just gets... more sweaters.
— Anderson Dennis (@HeyheyDRA) December 6, 2014
That's my history of the category (you know we can't just copy and paste press releases here at TFE much to our woeful exhaustion) and my seven questions. Care to answer them or ask any of your own?
UPDATED OSCAR CHARTS: ALL AURAL CATEGORIES, PICTURE, DIRECTOR, SCREENPLAYS -- ACTING & ANIMATION & FOREIGN & VISUAL CATEGORIES LIKE THIS ONE TO COME TODAY... PAINSTAKING PROCESS!