I feel like we’ve done a pretty decent job of educating some of our readership on the difference between Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing over the last five years here at In Contention. It struck me that we haven’t really covered it in a focused way this season, and the Oscar Guide seems as good a place as any to recap.
Sound editing, which we covered Friday, concerns the manifestation of artificial sound effects and the overall manipulation of the sonic identity of a film. Sound mixing concerns the balance of those various elements, in addition to music and dialogue, as well as the on-the-set maintenance of production audio. This year’s slate was an eyebrow-raising one to say the least.
The nominees are:
“Inception” (Lora Hirschberg, Gary A. Rizzo and Ed Novick)
“The King’s Speech” (Paul Hamblin, Martin Jensen and John Midgley)
“Salt” (Jeffrey J. Haboush, Greg P. Russell, Scott Millan and William Sarokin)
“The Social Network” (Ren Klyce, David Parker, Michael Semanick and Mark Weingarten)
“True Grit” (Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter F. Kurland)