An Inside Look at the 2023 Oscar Nominees for Best Production Design

Table Of Content

• Production design by Dylan Cole and Ben Procter; set decoration by Vanessa Cole
• ALL AWARDS CONTENDERS AND RANKINGS:
• 'Challengers' Heats Up: How Zendaya's Star Power and a Sexy Love Triangle Could Give Gen Z Its Next Movie Obsession
• Top Story
• Best Documentary Feature
• Ethan Hawke Shares Denzel Washington’s Advice on Winning an Oscar

If you want to build beautifully expressive and colorful film sets like those in The Grand Budapest Hotel, check out our video below. Each of the last 14 films that have received this honor have also collected at least one more Oscar, with the last lone winner having been “Sweeney Todd.” The most overlap has occurred in Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, and Best Score, with five instances each. Any of the present production design contenders could continue the tradition, but “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “Babylon,” and “Elvis” are best positioned to do so since they are each nominated in two of the three most commonly correlational categories.

Production design by Dylan Cole and Ben Procter; set decoration by Vanessa Cole

Oscar winner Rick Carter (“Lincoln,” “Avatar”) recreated Steven Spielberg’s childhood for his semi-autobiographical “The Fabelmans.” He cracked “the Spielberg code” of recurring themes and motifs from his movies, turning this into a classic migration tale. The three Fabelman houses in New Jersey, Arizona, and Northern California became chambers of Sammy’s (Gabriel LaBelle) psychological development, based on Spielberg’s memories and photo reference material from his family archives. For Chazelle’s wild wide through Hollywood’s Roaring ’20s, Martin (“Blonde,” “Licorice Pizza”) and the art department highlighted the parallels between the formation of L.A. The team of 150 craftspeople created a world of lavish, jewel-toned fabricated environments set against the hot, barren, and inhospitable desert of early L.A.

ALL AWARDS CONTENDERS AND RANKINGS:

"I think any of us who make movies know that you kind of dream of this moment," producer Emma Thomas said. "I could deny it, but I have been dreaming about this moment for so long, but it seemed so unlikely that it would ever actually happen, and now I'm standing here and everything's kind of gone out of my head." The big “miniatures” in The Return of the King are so finely detailed that they’re near indistinguishable from real sets. Art director John Box won his second Oscar for Best Production Design for Doctor Zhivago; his first win was for another David Lean collaboration – Lawrence of Arabia. Tavoularis, Graham and Nelson would go on to work with Ford Coppola again for Apocalypse Now – and the trio received an Academy Award nomination for Best Production Design for their work.

'Challengers' Heats Up: How Zendaya's Star Power and a Sexy Love Triangle Could Give Gen Z Its Next Movie Obsession

This year, the nominees are a particularly formidable lineup spanning cinematic genres, time periods, and moods—from glittering underwater worlds to extravagant Gilded Age-era mansions. Below, we take a look at the five best production design nominees before the Academy Awards ceremony on March 12. In the days of cinema where CGI has replaced so many calls for locations and architectural design, we still can appreciate those in the production design and set decoration fields, especially when you have a category that is this stacked. Easily the most well rounded batch of five nominees I’ve covered thus far (yet there is still a clear winner in my eyes), the Academy’s nominees for Best Production Design are unquestionably strong this year, all for different reasons.

Best Actress

A clearly emotional Stone thanked director Yorgos Lanthimos for the “gift of a lifetime” for her role as Bella Baxter. This awards season, Nolan has won a Golden Globe for best director and BAFTAs for best director and best film. I think most people would agree that the production design in the 1989 Batman is the probably the best production design of any superhero movie ever made.

But she’s not a lock to win; Damien Chazelle’s hedonistic Hollywood epic wasn’t well received, and “Elvis” was. Plus, Catherine Martin is an Academy celebrity, who previously won for “The Great Gatsby” and “Moulin Rouge! This video explains how production designer extraordinaires David Wasco and Sandy Reynolds-Wasco built the “look of love” we see throughout La La Land.

Best Documentary Feature

Martin was indeed the first woman to pull off multiple wins in this category and has since been joined in that distinction by Nancy Haigh (“Bugsy,” 1992 and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” 2020). This year, the group could come to include Dunn or Carter’s collaborator, Karen O’Hara, who was initially feted for “Alice in Wonderland” in 2011. She has also received academy mentions for her work in “The Color of Money” (1987) and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (2021). Christopher Nolan‘s blockbuster biopic was nominated in every single below-the-line category it was eligible for. Anyone who has seen the film on the big screen will have marveled at the vast Los Alamos, New Mexico environment where much of the title character’s work takes place. That’s contrasted with meeting rooms and Senate hearing halls where the story is also set.

In addition, De Jong was forced to do a rush job on the White House Oval Office set for Oppenheimer’s ill-fated meeting with President Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) when the original plans to use the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda fell through. They pulled the Oval Office set from “Veep” out of storage, which the construction team quickly got ready and added the lobby and cabinet room, working round the clock for five days. We speak with the production designers for five larger-than-life period piece films, ranging from 1920s Los Angeles to a war-torn France.

But bear in mind that the ADG Awards are voted on by production designers as opposed to the Oscars, where the entire academy will weigh in on this category. This is also a case of the Oscar newcomers behind “Poor Things” vs. the much-nominated artisan behind “Barbie” who might be due for an Oscar win. Like that film and many of the director’s films since, “Napoleon” shows off the enormous scale in which the filmmaker continues to work, creating grand battle sequences and impressive images, some that look like famous paintings of the French military leader. Griff is a first-time nominee, although her incredible work was also seen in Rian Johnson‘s “Glass Onion” from 2022. “Movies are dreams that you never forget,” Mitzi Fabelman tells her young son, Sammy, in Steven Spielberg’s tender coming-of-age film, The Fabelmans.

What started out as unknown territory to production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer (who have seven Oscar nominations between them and are more at home with period pieces such as “Atonement”) became the most surreal experience of their careers. They started with a representation of Barbie Dreamhouse playhouses (with all the necessary toy-like props) set against the modernist backdrop of mid-century Palm Springs. Then they embraced an old-school, in-camera, practical method of set building, only in miniature. They reduced the scale by 23 percent to make Margo Robbie’s Barbie, Ryan Gosling’s Ken (Best Supporting Actor nominee), and the other actors look bigger. What they didn’t count on was causing a global shortage of fluorescent pink paint, but Mattel scrambled to get what they needed.

This next video takes a tour through the original set and shows what it looked like without cast and crew. Over the course of 200 minutes, Francis Ford Coppola transports us from Ellis Island to Lake Tahoe to Havana and more in order to tell the story of two generations of Godfathers. Titanic is proof that production design can go a long way in regards to visual quality. Lamont received his only Oscar win for Titanic; Ford also won 15 years prior for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Pan’s Labyrinth features one of if not the best production design in any of Guillermo del Toro’s films. See the latest film predictions, in all 23 categories, in one place on Variety’s Oscars Collective.

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Pay attention to color next time you watch The Aviator – you may notice subliminal tones that brilliantly aid the mood. Jules Verne’s 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea captivated readers for generations before it received a proper movie adaptation in 1954. Richard Fleischer’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea faced a difficult challenge in making an adaptation that would appease all of those who had read Verne’s novel, but with the help of art director John Meehan and set decorator Emile Kuri, he pulled it off. Cedric Gibbons won more Academy Awards for Best Production Design than any other production designer in history. With a voluminous pixie styled by hair pro Takesha Sturdivant-Drew using ghd tools.

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