Best of 2011: Art Direction

You know how this is often one of the first awards Oscar doles out on the telecast? If it's good enough for him...



BEST ART DIRECTION

Jane Eyre (WILL HUGHES-JONES)
... for avoiding temptations to modernize but still maintaining an eerie, defamiliarizing pall, and making us feel all temperatures and textures;

Rango (MARK "CRASH" McCREERY)
... for sticking to its pop-guns, flaunting an everyone's-a-freak flag for kids and adults alike, and finding images to suit a rococo script;

The Skin I Live In (ANTXÓN GÓMEZ)
... for using color, texture, and lines brilliantly to evoke psychological atmospheres and then pouring more meanings into them than we guessed;

Sleeping Beauty (ANNIE BEAUCHAMP)
... for keying up the world's ritual and antiseptic qualities, yielding uncanny yet oddly plausible environs that buoy protagonist's alienation; and

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (MARIA DJURKOVIC)
... for what I've called a "Cinecittà of mildewed bureaucracy," a sad, post-Mod spin on Zodiac, entrancing to peer at but soul-sapping to inhabit.

Runners-Up: 3, for balancing palette, geometries, styles of décor, and evocative Berlin locations to suit its thesis on people as free-radical molecules; Albert Nobbs, for being so unpretentiously convincing in its period idiom, and specifically as a mid-grade hotel; The Artist, for duplicating some early-Hollywood touchstones and elevating others to the stature of dreams; Hugo, for being a colossal technical achievement, even if it could have stood to feel less heavy and cluttered; and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, for marshaling locations better than any franchise movie out there, and handling everything from sandstorms to gadgets to skyscrapers just right.

For Distinguished Work with No Dinero: Beginners, for the great illustrations, and a world that passes back and forth from looking like one of Ewan's cartoons; Leap Year, for that indelible and character-revealing apartment; Like Crazy, for believable dorms and workplaces, and good indicators of when the relationship has energy and when it doesn't; Weekend, for saving lines and screentime by showing us just who these guys are, via what they own and how they live; and Win Win, not just for credible suburban living but for a vaguely pop-inflected palette that places the movie nicely between realism and fable.

For Distinguished Work with Prehistoric Technology: The proto-humans of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, whose efforts with a hunk of charcoal, some variable lines, and the curve of a cave wall led to some pretty fabulous mo-cap, and plenty of incredible trompe-l'oeil and forced perspective, putting a lot of film crews with $100 million budgets to shame. Way to go, Ayla and Og!

Films I'd Have Mentioned If I'd Seen Them in Time: War Horse

Films I Hated to Skip Before Posting: City of Life and Death, House of Pleasures, Mysteries of Lisbon