Oscars 2018 Category Breakdown: Best Costume Design

So what we do here each year as a warm up for the Oscars is, I break down each of the 24 categories. The idea is to both familiarize everyone with the category and its history. I look at what the major trends are throughout the past bunch of years, how the precursors tend to go, whether they matter or not, that sort of stuff. I look at how the category came to be this year, and just anything else that seems totally pertinent about it. Then I rank each of the nominees and tell you what their likelihood (at this particular moment in time) of winning is.

This is all prelude to my giant Oscar ballot that I’m gonna give you. But I figure, if you have these as the warmup, it’s not as intimidating. You’ll have seen a lot of the pertinent trends here and we’ll all be able to reference these as a sort of cheat sheet. Plus it shows you where my head is at for how I think each of the categories are gonna go, and you can see me working my way up to all the bad decisions I usually make while guessing. Pretty much, with this, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how the category is gonna turn out.

Today is Best Costume Design. AKA Best Frills. We probably didn’t need to wait this long to go over it, but I feel like this one could be interesting, so I wanted to wait until most of the precursors were in before I talked about it.

CDG is the major precursor. They don’t hand out for another few days. But for reference later, here’s how they do historically:

• 2017, The Shape of Water won Period and lost the Oscar to Phantom Thread.
• 2016… this was one of the few times CDG was way off. Hidden Figures won Period and wasn’t nominated for the Oscar. Doctor Strange won Fantasy and also wasn’t nominated. La La Land won Contemporary and lost the Oscar. (Fantastic Beasts won.)
• 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road won Fantasy and won the Oscar.
• 2014, The Grand Budapest Hotel won period and won the Oscar.
• 2013, 12 Years a Slave won Period and lost the Oscar to Great Gatsby.
• 2012, Anna Karenina won Period and won the Oscar.
• 2011, W.E. won Period and lost the Oscar to The Artist.
• 2010, Alice in Wonderland won Fantasy and won the Oscar.
• 2009, The Young Victoria won Period and won the Oscar.
• 2008, The Duchess won Period and won the Oscar.
• 2007, Sweeney Todd won Period and lost the Oscar to Elizabeth: The Golden Age.
• 2006, Curse of the Golden Flower won Period and lost the Oscar to Marie Antoinette.
• 2005, Memoirs of a Geisha won Period and won the Oscar.

2005 is reasonably the earliest we can go for helpful data. In all those years, they’re 7/13. So they’re solid, but not automatic. I also feel like in at least two of those years they deliberately went off the really obvious Oscar winner.

Here are BAFTA’s winners in those years:

• 2017, Phantom Thread
• 2016, Jackie
• 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road
• 2014, The Grand Budapest Hotel
• 2013, The Great Gatsby
• 2012, Anna Karenina
• 2011, The Artist
• 2010, Alice in Wonderland
• 2009, The Young Victoria
• 2008, The Duchess
• 2007, La Vie en Rose
• 2006, Pan’s Labyrinth
• 2005, Memoirs of a Geisha

They’re 10/13.

BFCA:

• 2017, Phantom Thread
• 2016, Jackie
• 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road
• 2014, The Grand Budapest Hotel
• 2013, The Great Gatsby
• 2012, Anna Karenina
• 2011, The Artist
• 2010, Alice in Wonderland
• 2009, The Young Victoria

2016 was the only time they’ve missed.

So yeah. We’re generally in good hands.

Best Costume Design

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Black Panther

The Favourite

Mary Poppins Returns

Mary Queen of Scots

I feel like this category was pretty set all around. You knew Black Panther, The Favourite, Mary Poppins and Mary Queen of Scots were gonna be there. Three of them hit all the precursors and Black Panther was missing BAFTA, but you knew they’d put it on. The only real question was that fifth spot. Bohemian Rhapsody hit every precursor, and yet they left it off in favor of Buster Scruggs, which only had a BAFTA nomination. Go figure. Still, this was one where if you played the percentages, you were gonna get it mostly right. The one miss was a “shit happens” situation, which you have to expect when dealing with these things. So yeah, nothing overly surprising in terms of how this one came about.

In terms of precursors so far:

BAFTA: The Favourite

BFCA: Black Panther

And CDG announces in three days. I suspect The Favourite wins Period and Black Panther wins Fantasy. I think the latter is much more a slam dunk choice than the former. I think The Favourite could easily lose the guild, since they occasionally make some questionable choices, and tend to go for the designer over anything else. But looking at the choices… Sandy Powell has two nominees on both lists and her main competition has never won CDG Period. So yeah, I expect it to go the way we’d think. Put it this way… nothing that wins CDG Period over The Favourite will affect how I look at these rankings for a second.

Rankings:

5. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs — It missed almost all the precursors and this is its only major nomination. The Coens for Screenplay is basically an automatic at this point and it has a Song nomination which is just a random bonus. This is the only place it really landed, and I don’t think people are gonna see it and go, “I need to vote for that.” Remember how I said space movies always get nominated in Production Design but never win? Well, meet the western in Costume Design. The Revenant, True Grit, Australia… they don’t win. Just by glancing at this category any Oscar novice could tell you this is a fifth choice.

4. Mary Poppins Returns — Conventional wisdom says that with four overall nominations this should go higher, but you have to realize… frills win in this category. So it goes fourth. The costumes are nice and colorful, but no one’s gonna be falling over themselves to take this. The other three are clearly “costume” films. Two of them specifically, one of them more, “Oh yeah, those were also very prevalent.” So this is the fourth choice. In a different category this might even be a second choice. But this is the afterthought to Disney’s nominations this year. I don’t see any momentum here. It’s lost all the precursors.

3. Mary Queen of Scots — It’s frills. It’s queens and it’s Costumes with a capital c. But, there’s another frills choice in the category, which relegates this to an afterthought. I wonder if this would have won if The Favourite weren’t here. But we’ll never know. And since this has lost to the two frontrunners lock step throughout the race, and this only has one other nomination and it’s Makeup & Hairstyling, I can’t see this really going any higher than third, can you?

2. Black Panther — It’s got BFCA. Granted, BFCA fell over themselves to give this wins (though it still only won three), but it’s a win. And the costumes did look nice. Normally I would say this is the category to reward this one, since the costumes are the thing you cannot say anything negative about. They were specific, well-designed, and helped differentiate the characters well, which is something you should do in a movie where there are different tribes within the nation. So yeah, all that works for it. But, it lost BAFTA. And CDG I suspect will split. So I can’t call this a favorite in any way. Especially since… frills, man. It’s always gonna be a second choice that can win and not the likely winner. This is Costume Design. You know the deal.

1. The Favourite — It’s won BAFTA, it’ll probably take the guild, and it’s about a queen and has a lot of corsets. How is this not automatic? Outside of the insane Black Panther noise, were this any other year, I’d have had this as the automatic winner in one of the most locked categories of the night. I’d have said this was gonna win and maybe Mary Queen of Scots could pull a fast one that was unlikely given the 10-2 nominations ratio. Here, this is a clear favorite and Black Panther is a “could happen.” Costume Design, guys. We haven’t seen frills in a few years. Last year had Victoria and Abdul and slightly Beauty and the Beast, but Phantom Thread was all about dresses, so that was a nonstarter. 2016, no frills. 2015, Cinderella, maybe? 2014, no frills. 2013, nothing particular. 2012 — Anna Karenina, frills. 2011, The Artist wins over frills, but frills in a movie no one’s ever heard of. (Anyone remember Anonymous, perhaps the most appropriately-titled movie we could be talking about right now?) The Young Victoria, The Duchess, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Marie Antoinette… this category was built on frills. They’re not gonna pass up an opportunity to go back to them. Especially when this is tied for the most nominations! Come on, guys. It’s not that hard!

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