Numlock Awards: Costuming Fire and Ash

Everyone asks who Varang is but now how Varang is.

Numlock Awards is your one-stop awards season newsletter. Join Walt Hickey and Michael Domanico as they break down the math behind the Oscars and the best narratives going into film’s biggest night. Today’s edition comes from Michael.

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of James Cameron’s Avatar franchise? Blue cat aliens? Whales that speak in papyrus font? Sigourney Weaver’s voice incongruously clashing with the other Na’vi children?

Well, if you’re the sickos in the Academy this year, you’ve been Varang-pilled. Played by Oona Chaplin, Varang is the goth, fire-loving Na’vi who hunts other Na’vi and hooks up with main antagonist Colonel Quaritch. And Varang helped the Avatar franchise score its first ever nomination for Best Costume Design for Deborah L. Scott, who’s costumed every Avatar feature (as well as Titanic, for which she won an Oscar).

Avatar: Fire and Ash almost got blanked at the Oscars, with the obligatory Best Visual Effects nomination as its only other nod. (Both previous Avatar installments won in that category.) But Scott’s costume work is a notable, somewhat surprising entry in the category, where she’s competing against more standard, period-piece fare: Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, and Sinners.

The nomination for Costume Design is particularly interesting because the costumes we see on screen are ultimately produced by visual effects artists, overseen by Scott’s costume department. Scott produces the costumes in real life, but the VFX team has to translate those into what we see on the characters, since the actors run around in black motion-capture suits.

Speaking to Forbes, Scott said, “We made all the costumes in real life because of the complexity of the garments, if you don’t have it in real life, you just don’t have it. Making them gives a perfect template to turn over to the VFX artists. It’s like, we give them the real thing, then they do their thing.” This involves scanning the garments to place them on the models of the characters.

Not only do the VFX artists get the physical garments themselves to look at and play around with, they also receive footage of the garments being tested in different ways, like how they look in water or with wind.

For Varang specifically, Scott told Awards Radar that Varang had a single, minimalist look when she first started working on the character with James Cameron, but she eventually designed seven costumes for our favorite pyromaniac.

“Once Oona got cast and once she started to perform that character… the way she uses her body, her movements, her stature, it just really informed what I could do with the costumes,” Scott said in a recent interview with The Upcoming. “Initially, she was kind of minimal, and then quickly, very quickly, Jim and I recognized that she needed a big wardrobe. She was going to be the statement. You could run a little wild and come up with all sorts of crazy things but most of the costumes were based on her movement.”

Varang, with her ornate head piece, distinctive jewelry, and sultry two-piece, quickly became a fan favorite, and took up a lot of the discourse around the latest Avatar film. Scott, of course, had to costume everyone, not just one Mangkwan baddie, but Varang became the focal point, and likely gave Scott that extra push she needed to land her second-ever Oscar nomination.

Where do you fall on the Varang scale? Are you rooting for Scott’s second win, or did another nominee capture your costume-loving eye? Let us know in the comments!