Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/102700
In terms of Oscar-worthy films, 2012 charted a familiar course — the first eight months of the year saw a handful of potential contenders, including The Dark Knight Rises, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Brave and Moonrise Kingdom, but it's the final stretch where the studios stack up such serious, prestige projects (along with a few more lighthearted movies) as Lincoln, The Master, Anna Karenina, Hyde Park on Hudson, Argo, Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, The Impossible, Flight, The Sessions, Zero Dark Thirty, Les Miserables, Skyfall, Hitchcock, The Hobbit and Django Unchained. Will Oscar as usual turn a blind eye to earlier releases in favor of the year-end log-jam? Impossible to tell, but with all that in mind, we now look into our crystal ball and present our annual top picks list of likely nominees. BEST PICTURE/ BEST DIRECTOR/ EDITING AND SOUND It's been 12 years since Oscar-winning director Robert Zemeckis, who has focused his energy on animated projects over the past decade, has made a live-action film. So Flight, a drama starring Denzel Washington about an airline pilot who avoids a crash, marks a welcome return to live action by the Forrest Gump and Cast Away auteur. It also marks a fresh collaboration with famed DP Don Burgess, who set the From there, the data went to another workstation where it was cloned for the editor and all other necessary copies, and was then shipped back to Light Iron Digital for storage and post. "I like to set up a projection screen in a trailer where you can show dailies the next day at lunch," he adds. "So the colorizing of all that is done entirely on set and on location, so that I can keep control of the pipeline and what that footage is going to look like to the studio, the editor and all the post people." Light Iron has cases and carts set up that they can send on location, "to do all that work and cloning, and to add the color look," Burgess says, "so that made the whole workflow pretty trouble-free." After three films together, "we have a very efficient pipeline, dealing with all the data and cloning and storage issues." Editor Jeremiah O'Driscoll, who first collaborated on Death Becomes Her and worked on Forrest Gump and Cast Away for Zemeckis, reports that, "This was so much easier than the motion capture projects we were doing — it was great to get back to live action." The editor, who cut on Avid Media Composer, began the film on the Paramount lot while the film shot on location in Atlanta, "discussing the edit with Bob" via computer hook-up and teleconferencing. O'Driscoll then spent two weeks on location working with Zemeckis before moving the cutting room back to the director's office in Car- teamed Post offers its best guesses for Oscar gold. Oscar Picks e used to that made me is get- Thirty: ogether in standard By Iain Blair shot both those hit films and whose credits include such varied fare as Spider-Man and The Muppets. Burgess, who shot on Red Epics, has long been a champion of integrating post elements prior to production. "I like to set the whole look of the film before we even start principal photography," he states. For Flight, Burgess worked very closely with LA-based Light Iron Digital, with whom he first began collaborating with on The Muppets and again on his recently wrapped movie 42. "I'd take images shot on the Red Epic to their DI facility and put them up on the big screen, and then tweak the colors to create the look of the movie from a starting point," he reports. "Then once I was on location, I had a set-up right there on the set where all the data is checked as soon as it's been shot, and a look is also applied to those shots." &W and you back penteria, CA. "The most difficult sequence to cut was actually the bit where Denzel's character staggers around the house drunk," notes the editor, "not any of the action scenes. It was just very tricky to trim down all the great material Denzel gave us to work with." The final dub was done at Skywalker. With Argo as his third film as director (in which he also stars), Ben Affleck's hostage rescue thriller tells the tale of six Americans who escaped the 1979 takeover of their embassy, and who were eventually smuggled out of the country in plain sight as part of a covert CIA operation. Part period drama/part political thriller/part spy story, the result has been getting its director strong Oscar buzz (see Post's exclusive interview with the director in the November 2012 issue). Affleck shot in Istanbul, LA and Washington, DC, and reveals that during post, www.postmagazine.com Post0113_022-26-OscarsMV3FINALREAD.indd 23 Post•January2013 23 12/21/12 4:16 PM