Academy Award for Best Sound?

C

combatentropy

Veteran
What is the criteria for the Academy Award for Best Sound? When I go to the movies, I can form an opinion for most categories: Picture, Directing, Acting, Writing, Cinematography. But I've never come out of a movie saying, "Wow, that movie had great sound!"

With the other categories, like Directing, there are so many facets to them, so many things to get right, and such a wide difference among movies, that it's easy to form your own opinion. It's also easy to see where the Academy was going, even if you disagree with their picks.

I am not saying that good sound is easy or that there is little to know about making great sound. Getting good sound is hard work and takes some money. The sound in my little movies was never great. It's just that to me all Hollywood movies have excellent sound. I mean, they've got it licked. Although some may be ever so slightly better than others, none ever stood out to me. They're all using high-end microphones. They are all using one or two people on set whose sole purpose is to hold the boom mic. Then there's another person whose sole purpose is to ride the levels on the recorder. Every background noise is carefully handled. In fact, the way they record it, there is no background noise in the dialog track. Any background noise was deliberately added in post.

There is another category for sound effects, or sound editing, and I get that. I mean, Star Wars, for example, had great sound effects editing. But the category that befuddles me is the other one, called Best Sound or Best Sound Mixing. I have a hard time believing you can really hear much difference. To confirm my cynicism, I see that usually the nominees for Best Sound happen to also be the ones for Best Picture. It makes me wonder if they are not doing what in fact I would do in their place, which is to say, "Aw, I can't tell the difference. Let's just give the Best Picture nods an extra nomination."
 
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Good question. Unfortunately, the academy let's all members vote for the winner in a category. The nominees are selected by those who work in the discipline.

So it is a popularity contest. Most people are un-initiated in the finer aspects of what it takes to make great sound.

One deciding factor is the sound design. Just how much work did it take to figure out what the sound composition would be for the picture. An old example might be Jurasic park, where the sound designer had to figure out what dinosaurs sound like and assign a unique sound for each species. Where did those sounds come from?

How much work it to to generate the library of sounds for a picture. A film that is mostly talking heads may not be as big a challenge as a action picture that has 1000s of sound elements.

How much mixing is required? Same as above, mixing the dialog, effects, and music, comprising over 100 tracks simultaneously (it usually takes 3 mixers to mix a major feature) in an action sequence without it being a mush of sound is quite an achievement.

There are many other elements, but those are some examples.
 
I bet "The Artist" wins this year! :Drogar-Happy(DBG):

I used to judge sound dubbing for BAFTA and was always amazed at the ignorance of the non sound people on the panel.

If you take the same analogy that you use in your question then any idiot with a high end camera can make cinematic films, as for directing well you just shoot with lots of cameras and one of them must have a decent shot somewhere that the work experience editor can cobble together.

Best do some research and see what actually goes into the sound for a film, it's a bit more than pointing a high end mic at a few wallies spouting a script, these may be a good place to start: http://www.skysound.com/ http://wbpostproduction.warnerbros.com/ http://www.popsound.com/

P.S When I was AMS Neve I also helped design the DFC consoles that they use here and at other high end dubbing facilities, two of my limey ex colleague now work for them too!
 
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I didn't take the OP's comments as in any way demeaning towards the craft of production sound, or towards any other aspect or role of film sound. In fact, he seemed to go out of his way to point out just the opposite, with boldface text at that...

What I think he's asking, and it's a great question (I'll second it)-- What sets one great sounding picture apart from any other great sounding picture, or group thereof? From a sound perspective, as in what makes one picture stand out as "best sound" in a field of all excellent sounding films, equipment choices and computer plug-ins aside. One answer offered has had to do with crafting heavy sound design elements vs. recording and mixing more "simple/natural" sounding elements (if I have that right). What else might there be, as far as criteria on the mind of the judges? Sonically? (Putting aside the notion that "Best Sound" is just an echo of whatever is nominated for "Best Picture")...

In other words, boiling something that's very subjective down to an "objective" list of criteria, what do we know, or imagine them to be, vis-a-vis "Best Sound?"

GJ
 
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There are usually two awards for sound. One for "best mixing", which goes to the production mixer and re-recording mixers, and one for "best sound editing" which goes to the supervising sound editor. I interned at Danetracks, which did all the sound effects and sound design on the Matrix movies, and they won an Oscar for the first Matrix movie. Only the supervising sound designer got the award, Dane Davis, but there was a whole team of people that worked on that movie.

As far as how you get nominated...that's a whole 'nother story. It's very political, and there is actually lobbying that goes on to get films nominated for one thing or another. There are people whose sole job is to get movies nominated for awards. That's for all the categories, not just sound. This is why I think the Academy awards are a friggin' joke (not to mention ego stroking), and when Randy Thom was nominated for his work on The Incredibles and The Polar Express (both in the same year), there was a discussion on the Yahoo sound design group that he is a part of about the whole process, and how it's not really fair, and how the Academy was thinking of putting the sound category in the technical awards, which are not televised, and Randy seemed pretty critical of it all. It was at that point that I straight up challenged him to return his Oscar if he won it. He did not. I have always maintained that if I ever won any sort of award like that, I would not accept it. I've been nominated for golden reel awards, and that whole process is a joke. We nominated ourselves. That was all their was to it. Then some panel that doesn't know anything about sound picks a winner.
 
Anyway everyone should know that all you need to get the best of anything these days is a media degree, a DSLR and some form of audio recording device set to auto with a $100 5.1 surround mic.

Chuck the whole lot into FCP X, hit the auto edit and sound levelling button then wait for all the competition prizes and oscars to roll in! ;0)

Seriously like all creative industries a lot of things can be subjective but there is a lot more time and effort goes into the sound side of film and TV than a lot of people can imagine, if it was that easy places like skywalker sound just would not exist and their list of awards includes some of the best films of the last few decades with Gary Rydstrom winning best sound with his team for Saving Private Ryan among other blockbusters.
 
I knew I'd get roasted a little and probably deserve it. Truth be told, I've shot over a hundred videos over the course of 15 years. All low-budget fiction or documentaries, but I've used shotgun mics, lavs, omnis, wireless, wired. I've used audio filters in post like compression and band pass filters. But I still am not a sound expert, and I still don't notice it like I notice the cinematography.

Reading further about the award, http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/rules/rule21.html, it seems it is more about mixing tracks in post, even though there is another award for sound editing, http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/rules/rule20.html. The second one is for sound effects editing. So clears it up a little. I was thinking that the first was for the quality of the basic on-set recording --- which again, for something as narrow in dynamic and frequency range as dialog, it's hard to excel above the rest, at least above the rest of Hollywood productions.
 
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the best sound mixing award encompasses both the production mixing and post mixing. To me, the awards don't mean as much as constantly working does. You know people like Jeff Welxer or Mark Ulano are really good production mixers because they are always working.
 
To give you some perspective of what it takes to win the Oscar for best mixing, an Oscar-winning mixer worked sixty-five 14 hour days without a break, to mix one feature film.

That's after every sound was identified (someone has to look at the film and 'spot' the sound, which is to determine what sounds should exist in the each scene; footsteps, breathing, dialog, room sound, bubbles a glass, a fan in the background, the sound of clothes rumpling, .....), a source for the sound found (most of the sound has to be re-created ), a music score written and recorded, the thousands of sound elements edited in sync to picture and assigned to a track and then finally, when all the sound elements are edited together, three mixers get together and take those 100+ tracks and make the sound un-noticable. It's just there.
 
Unless they have changed the names, they do periodically so?, it's BEST SOUND and BEST SOUND EDITING.

Not all awards are voted on by everyone. The sound awards are only voted on by those in the sound branch.

What you have to realize about the Oscars is that A) it's an industry award - like insurance salesmen voting the best salesman of the year.

It's not some on high award of perfection. B) the ACADEMY is a select group. It's not easy to get in and winning an Oscar doesn't guarantee it. The producer for TITANIC and AVITAR has faile three times to get in and so doesn't vote in the awards.

The BEST SOUND goes to the mixers, production and post, and is based on the somewhat outdated workflow when mixers were working with unmixed and tweaked elements. These days films can go to the mix already largely mixed and fixed. Mixing is still a critical step but it is not the end-all it once was.

Sound design till recently was not recognized and you could not get an Oscar for design. You could not even be tagged on to the editors if all you did was design. So the designer with the most Oscars in the history of the Oscars has all of them for mixing.

SOUND EDITING is misleading since it does not go to all the editors. It goes to the Supervising sound editor and to one or two others they specify, usually the head FX editor and now sometimes the Sound Designer. Dialog editing doesn't get an Oscar nor does ADR editors. Foley is not in any category. The Better awards for sound is the GOLDEN REEL - sound editing, and the CAS awards for mixing.

Since it's sound folks voting for the sound Oscar it tends to go to things that other sound folks want to recognize so it sometimes seems arbitrary, but it does usually make some sense.
 
Noiz2 said:
Unless they have changed the names, they do periodically so?, it's BEST SOUND and BEST SOUND EDITING.<br>
Click to expand...

The awards are titled Sound Editing and Sound Mixing.

Noiz2 said:
Since it's sound folks voting for the sound Oscar it tends to go to things that other sound folks want to recognize so it sometimes seems arbitrary, but it does usually make some sense.
Click to expand...

The nominees are selected by the Sound Branch. All active and life Academy members vote for Sound Editing and Sound Mixing award per Rule 20 and 21 of the rules.
 
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