Ever since the Academy merged Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing into one category, it’s become somewhat harder to know what voters will make of the oddly titled Best Sound. The first film to win this “new” category was Sound of Metal, which ingeniously put the viewer in the POV of someone losing their hearing. Last year, they went back to their old ways of rewarding the loudest film in the form of the bombastic epic Dune. All five nominees this year fit the latter bill. They’re all extremely loud.
The loudest of the bunch would be Top Gun: Maverick with its cinema-rattling sound design that’s seen it pick up wins with the Cinema Audio Society and the Motion Picture Sound Editors. Those two wins would normally be enough to make a contender relatively unbeatable, but it’s an unusual year and there’s another nominee waiting to nab this one.
It’s hard to know if the Academy will swoon over All Quiet on the Western Front as heavily as BAFTA did and if it will pick up a few tech wins as it did across the pond. They did give it nine Oscar nominations, which came as a shock to many, but whether those translate into wins is another story. It comes with sound victories at BAFTA and MPSE and the Academy has a habit of rewarding war films for their sound design (1917, Dunkirk, Hacksaw Ridge are a few recent examples).
However, the Academy will undoubtedly want to give Top Gun: Maverick at least one prize and Best Sound seems like the most obvious. When given the choice between a big budget blockbuster and a war epic, I can’t shake the feeling they’ll go with the former. It’s a coin-flip category and it could genuinely go either way. But the safest bet would be to stick with the more popular choice.
BEST SOUND PREDICTIONS:
1. Top Gun: Maverick (Paramount Pictures) – BAFTA, CAS, MPSE
2. All Quiet on the Western Front (Netflix) – BAFTA, CAS, MPSE
3. Avatar: The Way of Water (20th Century Studios) – BAFTA, CAS, MPSE
4. Elvis (Warner Bros.) – BAFTA, CAS, MPSE
5. The Batman (Warner Bros.) – CAS, MPSE
Will win: Top Gun: Maverick
Should win: Top Gun: Maverick
Possible shocker: Elvis
