Oscars: How Predictive Are the MPSE and CAS Guilds of the Best Sound Winner?
Though the sound branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences merged the best sound editing and best sound mixing Oscars into one category for best sound in 2020 (Sound of Metal was the first combined winner in 2021), there are still two organizations that honor sound work separately, both of which are hosting their awards ceremonies this weekend.
The Motion Picture Sound Editors and Cinema Audio Society represent sound editors and sound mixers, respectively. For years, the awards that they present — both their nominations and their winners — were studied for possible clues about what to expect from the sound branch of the Academy.
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The Academy’s sound branch — which is currently comprised of 551 people, or roughly five percent of the organization’s total membership — has always solely determined sound-related Oscar nominations. And it has always then been joined by the rest of the Academy in determining the sound-related Oscar winners.
Over the three most recent award seasons, since the merging of the two sound Oscars into one, has one of the sound-related guilds — MPSE or CAS — proven to be more predictive of that Oscar than the other? The answer is complicated.
It’s important to begin by noting that the CAS Awards has one top prize that recognizes the sound mixing of live-action features (and equivalent awards that recognize the sound mixing of animated and documentary features), whereas the MPSE’s Golden Reel Awards has three prizes that are regarded as equally important. Those recognize feature dialogue/ADR editing, feature effects/Foley work and music editing.
Last year, CAS gave its top prize to Oppenheimer, while the Oscar was awarded to The Zone of Interest. In the three years before that, CAS and the Academy gave their sound prizes to the same three films: Top Gun: Maverick, Dune and Sound of Metal. That’s a stellar track record. But before that, they were often but not always on the same page. In 2020, Ford v Ferrari was the CAS winner; it also won the Oscar for best sound editing, but sound mixing went to 1917. All three went to Bohemian Rhapsody in 2019 and Dunkirk in 2018. In 2017, La La Land won CAS, but the Academy awarded the sound editing Oscar to Arrival and the sound mixing Oscar to Hacksaw Ridge.
Last year, the Academy awarded best sound to Oppenheimer, which had won MPSE’s dialogue/ADR and Foley awards; Maestro won MPSE’s music editing award. In 2023 and 2022, the eventual best sound Oscar winners — Top Gun: Maverick and Dune — first won only best Foley at MPSE. In 2021, Sound of Metal won the Oscar but didn’t get any love at the Golden Reel Awards, and in 2020, eventual Oscar winner 1917 scored MPSE’s best dialogue/ADR, while Ford v Ferrari won best Foley and Jojo Rabbit won best music. The year before that, the big winner at the Oscars and CAS, Bohemian Rhapsody, scored only best dialogue/ADR at MPSE.
Now for this year’s best sound Oscar nominees. A Complete Unknown was nominated by CAS and by MPSE (for dialogue/ADR and music editing). Dune: Part Two received a CAS nom and noms for all three MPSE honors. Emilia Perez was passed over by CAS, but received an MPSE music editing nod. And Wicked was nominated by CAS and MPSE (for dialogue/ADR and music editing).
This year’s fifth best sound Oscar nominee, the animated feature The Wild Robot, presents an interesting case. It was nominated by CAS in the animation feature category and by MPSE for sound editing in feature animation. The last time an animated feature was nominated for a sound-related Oscar was in the first year of the unified sound category. That film, Soul, was nominated for — and won — the same awards for which The Wild Robot is nominated at CAS and MPSE (Sound of Metal won the year Soul was nominated at the Oscars).
Is any of the aforementioned overlap causal or coincidental? The latter seems more likely, since, again, 95 percent of the voters who determine the winner of the best sound Oscar are not members of the sound community at all.
Perhaps for that reason, the Academy tends to award its sound-related Oscars to best picture nominees, as was the case in each of the last three years, because those are the nominated films that they are most likely to have seen and liked; and/or to films in which sound, or the lack thereof, is front and center (like Sound of Metal, which was about losing one’s hearing, or The Zone of Interest, which was notable for its subtle use of sound to tell the story of Auschwitz).
What does that mean for this year’s best sound Oscar nominees? Well, four of the five are nominated for best picture (A Complete Unknown, Dune: Part Two, Emilia Pérez and Wicked). And four of the five are musicals or some variation thereof (A Complete Unknown, Emilia Pérez, Wicked and The Wild Robot), while the other one is a sound-centric sequel to a past best sound winner (Dune: Part Two).
In other words, your guess is as good as ours.
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