FINAL 2021 Oscar Nomination Predictions: SOUND

Sound of Metal, Greyhound and News of the World have shown their strength with both sound guilds – Cinema Audio Society and Motion Picture Sound Editors Guild – as well as BAFTA, and over stiff competition.

The last two spots could go a lot of ways. The Trial of the Chicago 7 showed its Best Picture frontrunner strength with CAS and two MPSE nominations so I feel good about it here. Mank‘s mono sound design has been regarded as everything from great to a cheap gimmick but it hit the guilds. It’s on shaky ground.

The Midnight Sky seemed like an easy nomination here, space movies almost always are. Even Ad Astra showed up after its disastrous release and awards run. That was largely on the strength of Gary Rydstrom and his astonishing record of 19 Oscar nominations and seven wins. The Midnight Sky’s Randy Thom is no slouch, with 15 nominations and two wins.

The sound team from Tenet has an insane 39 Oscar nominations between them (21 from Kevin O’Connell alone) and nine wins but those accolades have been largely drowned out by response to the film’s poor sound design. So much so that even BAFTA and CAS passed.

Nomadland isn’t the type of film that normally gets in here and their three-person sound team has just one nomination between them but conversations with various sound engineers showed that it might be stronger than some suspect. As a Best Picture frontrunner, it could crack the the top 5. But, with the combination of the two sound categories now that seems like a harder reach than it would have been before.

Here are my final Oscar nomination predictions in Sound.

• 1. Sound of Metal (Amazon Studios) – BAFTA, CAS, MPSE (x3)
  Phillip Bladh, Nicolas Becker, Jaime Baksht, Michelle Couttolenc, Carlos Cortés, Carolina Santana
• 2. News of the World (Universal Pictures) – BAFTA, CAS, MPSE (x3)
  John Pritchett, Mike Prestwood Smith, William Miller, Oliver Tarney, Michael Fentum
• 3. Greyhound (Apple TV+) – BAFTA, CAS, MPSE (x2)
  Odin Benitez, Jason King, Christian P. Minkler, Michael Minkler, Jeff Sawyer
• 4. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix) – CAS, MPSE (x2)
  Renee Tondelli, Dan Kenyon, Julian Slater, Michael Babcock, Thomas Varga
• 5. Mank (Netflix) – CAS, MPSE
  Ren Klyce, Jeremy Molod, David Parker, Nathan Nance, Drew Kunin

Watch out for: The Midnight Sky (Netflix) – MPSE (x2)