Numlock Awards: Millennial Pink Is Out, Barbie Pink Is In
The production design category is a two-film race.
Numlock Awards is your one-stop awards season newsletter. Every week, 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.
Hi everyone,
Today I wanted to dive into a category we haven’t spent much time with before: Best Production Design.
This category has been around since the very first Oscars. It’s an award that goes for bold choices like Tim Burton’s Batman, Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, or Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, to name a few. It honors the production designer — the person chiefly responsible for overseeing the sets of a film — and the set decorator, who helps bring those sets to life.
This year’s nominees include two perennial favorite types of nominees: the flashy (Barbie, Poor Things) and the historical (Killers of the Flower Moon, Napoleon, Oppenheimer).
And the ADG Went To…
The Art Directors Guild Awards are the guild award for the production designers, akin to WGA for writers or SAG for actors. Like other artistic guilds, they have their awards split among contemporary film, period film, fantasy film and animated film categories.
Oppenheimer beat out Killers and Napoleon for the period film award, while Poor Things edged out Barbie. (The contemporary film award went to Saltburn, and the animation award to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.) And over at the BAFTAs, all of the nominees are competing against each other save for Napoleon, which is replaced by The Zone of Interest.
This is most likely a race between Barbie and Poor Things, given this category’s openness to fantasy. And weirdly, a Chris Nolan movie has never won in this category.
A Barbie Girl in a Barbie World
Despite missing at the ADG Awards, Barbie is still a formidable contender. Who can forget the viral story that the movie had caused an international shortage of pink paint?
Sarah Greenwood, the production designer, and Katie Spencer, the set decorator, have been nominated as a duo seven times — the last year they were nominated was 2017, when they got double nods for Beauty and the Beast and Darkest Hour. These were the two women who had to go through every shade of pink and pick the twelve best to bring Barbieland to life.
One of the keys to making Barbie’s sets work was making everything a little too small for the actors. Speaking to the MPA, Greenwood said, “If you put the doll in the Dreamhouse and she puts her hands in the air, she can touch the ceiling. She is strikingly out of scale. It’s the same with the car. Barbie never quite fits because her legs don’t bend. We worked it out to be 23% smaller than human size for the sets. What this did is when you built it for real, you made the actors seem bigger in the house. That gives it a toy quality or what we found out Mattel calls toyetic. Finding what it is that makes it a toy.”
Something working in Barbie’s favor is how Spencer had to then flip the set when the Kens take over Barbieland. In a hilarious dig, Spencer told the L.A. Times that she had to bring in La-Z-Boy leather couches, barbecues, televisions displaying horses and other things Ken loved from the real world. After filming, “about 50% of the crew wanted the stuff from the Mojo Dojo house after the film, although I’m not going to say which 50%.”
It’s pretty rare that an Architectural Digest video about a fictional set would get 16 million views on YouTube, but Margot Robbie’s tour of the Dreamhouse did just that. It’s rare to get a genuine cultural phenomenon in the mix here, so I’m giving the edge to Barbie, despite Poor Things taking hom the ADG.
Poor Things, Lavish Sets
First-time nominees James Price and Shona Heath (the production designers) and Zsuzsa Mihalek (the set decorator) are picking up steam on the awards circuit, and a win at tomorrow’s BAFTAs could be decisive.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos — known for off-kilter fare like The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer — “wanted to build everything like a 1930s studio movie, [with] a lot of old school techniques,” according to Price.
Lanthimos is also known for his use of the fisheye lens, which has a habit of revealing any imperfections in a film’s set. “We’d done a test with [the cinematographer] and Yorgos with the fisheye lens, and I remember the first thing you see is kind of up and under the curtain rails and we were like, ‘S**t, everything’s going to have to be a hundred percent finished. There’s nowhere to hide.’ So we didn’t hide. We just filled it and finished it. So, I think out of fear, all that stuff was there,” Heath told Deadline. But, as Price explained to Vogue, it ended up being a great opportunity to show off most of their designs, as so many film sets are usually only partially seen by the audience.
Similar to how Barbie’s sets needed to be shrunk down for that toyetic feel, Poor Things, also, had to accommodate its strange central character Bella, who is a child in an adult woman’s body.
“Bella, obviously, was coming into the world as a gigantic toddler, and so the house was decorated with sort of round walls and padded walls,” per Heath.
And it’s not just Stone whose performance had to meld with the set. Ramy Youssef perhaps summed it up best to the L.A. Times: “So many of these rooms totally informed the way that we performed, because you walk into the set and go, ‘Oh, my God, this is breathtaking; this is unbelievable.’ I was looking at a lamp and going, ‘Man I’ve gotta act on the level of this lamp, because it’s so real and so 1800s, and it’s so — I cannot let the lamp down.’”
Who are you rooting for in production design? Are you a Barbie girl, or a Victorian reincarnated fetus?
Also — thank you to Bennett Herbert for helping crack the Flamin’ Hot eligibility question I brought up the other week, and for Andrew Truong for providing some leads!