They announced the ADG Awards last night, which should give us a little insight into the Production Design Oscar. Which, to my recollection, is one of the more interesting potential outcomes for the entire ceremony. There’s not a whole lot that feels wide open at this point, but this is a category that could be open.
Your category is — Arrival, Fantastic Beasts, Hail Caesar, La La Land and Passengers. All five of them were nominated at the ADG Awards. Arrival, Fantastic Beasts and Passengers were in the Fantasy category, La La Land was in Contemporary and Hail Caesar was in Period. But they were all nominated.
The Contemporary winner was, of course, La La Land.
The Fantasy winner was Passengers. Not Arrival or Fantastic Beasts. Which is interesting.
The Period winner was Hidden Figures. Not even Hail Caesar, knowing it was nominated for the Oscar.
ADG has a decent track record at the Oscars, but it’s difficult because they have three categories. Still, they’re 13/20 historically, which is decent, but not automatic. Fortunately, that’s where BAFTA comes in. They’re on nice little 3-for-3 streak at the moment and typically are pretty good at augmenting what ADG does. And BFCA has been pretty good at gauging where it’s gonna go as well.
Though I will say — with ADG and BFCA both going La La Land‘s way, and Passengers not being a film that will fare well in an open vote, Fantastic Beasts not being the kind of movie that will be embraced either (it’s kind of the Hobbit of the Harry Potter franchise… and they didn’t even embrace Potter the way they embraced Lord of the Rings), Hail Caesar being a “maybe… I don’t know” kind of nominee and Arrival being an unknown quantity… it’s kind of looking like La La Land is gonna take this one down.
We’ll see what BAFTA has to say in a few hours. They’re announcing today, and that’s the last big piece of help we’re gonna get between now and the 26th. Aside from 4-5 guilds still to announce, most of which are only just gonna either confirm what we already suspect or not really be that big enough to do more than make us question what is probably gonna happen.
Right now, for this category at least, I’m thinking La La Land might take home another one. Though I’m still not ruling out the possibility of an Arrival or Hail Caesar surprise.
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