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OSCAR PICKS bring their intuition and inspiration to the film, as well as their technical expertise. So it was a great collaboration." And four years after Juno scored several Oscar nomi- nations for director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody (who won), the team is back with Young Adult, a black comedy starring Oscar-winner Charlize Theron as a writer who tries to win back her now-married high-school sweetheart. EDITING Last year The Social Network walked away with the prize. This Alexander Payne and The Descendants. on location in Hawaii (see our interview with director Payne in the November issue), while Oscar-winner Roman Polanski, whose much-admired The Ghost Writer was snubbed last year, may be back in the race this year with Carnage, which was filmed in Paris. Based on the Broadway hit and Tony- winner God of Carnage, and boasting an Oscar-winning cast (Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and Jodie Foster), the film and its absurdist comedy is a perfect fit for the director, and was once again shot by DP Pawel Edelman, who was Oscar-nominated for his work on Polanski's The Pianist, and who also shot Oscar-winner Ray. Besides the front-runners, there are sev- eral other, critically acclaimed if lesser-seen, contenders that are also possibly being con- sidered by voters, including The Tree of Life, an ambitious, enigmatic movie starring Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, directed by the equally enigmatic and ambitious — and highly respected — Terrence Malick. The director is notoriously press-shy about discussing his work, but his longtime co-producer, Nicolas Gonda, reports that post on the film took some 18 months to complete. "We were based primarily at our offices in Austin, Texas, and then toward the end we went to LA for all the finishing," he says. "Laser Pacific did a lot of the digital finishing, and we did the DI at EFilm with Steve Scott. We did all our answer printing and photochemical process- es with Jim Passen at Deluxe. We did our sound mix at The Lot and worked very closely with our mixer Craig Burkie, who does all of our films." The Tree of Life marks the first DI for the team, and Gonda says that the experience was "terrific — Steve Scott's a true artist, and so is Brian McMann at Laser. We've worked with both of them before in differ- ent capacities, so they became an extension of our core post team and were able to 24 Post • January 2012 year, several notable contenders including Hugo, J. Edgar, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, The Artist, War Horse, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2 and Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol look like possi- ble nominations. Veteran editor Thelma Schoon- maker has cut all of Martin Scors- ese's films since 1980's Raging Bull and has a great Oscar track record — six nominations for Best Editing and three wins, for Raging Bull, The Aviator and The Departed. Their lat- est collaboration, the family-friend- ly Hugo marks a change of pace for Scorsese, the master of gritty dra- mas — and the first 3D movie for both. The fantasy, set in '30s Paris, stars Ben Kingsley and Sacha Baron Cohen, and Schoonmaker reports that the greatest challenge of edit- ing it was dealing with "all the 3D technical issues — how you proj- ect and finish it, and you have to be careful not to cut too quickly. But switching to 3D wasn't that hard." It helped that Scorsese had "a very planned-out concept for it, as he'd loved 3D since he was a kid, so he was thrilled to be able to make this," she adds. Hugo was shot at Shepperton British team of engineers upgraded it for 3D and were very helpful, so I could switch very quickly from 2D to 3D and back," she notes. After a "long, very difficult shoot — the kids could only work four hours a day," the team returned to New York in January 2010 and finished post and the sound mix by longtime Scorsese mixer Tom Fleischman at Sound Tracks in New York. J. Edgar features complex cutting between eras and storylines spanning 50 years, cour- tesy of Clint Eastwood's long-time editors Joel Cox (an Oscar-winner for Unforgiven) and Gary Roach, who's worked with the director since 1996. (See our interview with Cox in the December issue.) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with its twists and turns, is a showcase for editor Dino Jonsater, who cut director Tomas Alfredson's acclaimed Let the Right One In, while Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows was edited by Guy Ritchie's long-time editor James Herbert, and Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol was cut by veteran Paul Hirsch, who won Extremely Loud director Stephen Daldry. Studios, England, and Schoonmaker set up an editing suite adjacent to the stage and began cutting right from the start. It also marked the team's first all-digital production, as Scorsese has always shot on film before, even if they posted digitally. "So we had a digilab with a team working on the convergence of the two cameras, which all went on before I got the dailies," she reports. As usual, Schoonmaker edited on Light- works, which she's used since Casino. "The www.postmagazine.com Young Adult director Jason Reitman. the '78 Oscar for his work on Star Wars. And let's not forget last year's Best Editor winners Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. ANIMATION After a very strong 2010, where animated features such as Toy Story 3, Shrek Forever After, Despicable Me, Tangled and How to Train