Beauty and the Beast - 2 nominations

Costume Design, Jacqueline Durran
Production Design, Sarah Greenwood (Production Design); Katie Spencer (Set Decoration)

Belle is a young, bright, creative, bookish woman who dreams of more than her provincial life in France with a community who just doesn't get her.  Meanwhile, Belle's father is captured by a beastly prince, and she goes to the castle to trade her life for her father's.  While at the castle, she discovers that the prince and all of his attendants have been transformed, he into a beast that no one could love, and they into objects like wardrobes and candlesticks and teapots.  (Disney has never explained why the people who work for the Prince must also be punished by the evil witch, as if they had any agency over themselves and their loyalties to the Prince, but I digress.)

This film is a very good adaptation from animation to live action.  The costumes and the production design are both very worthy of nomination, and one has to give Jacqueline Durran a huge tip of the hat for having been nominated for Costume Design in both this film and The Darkest Hour - she has two of the five nominations in this category this year. I tried to find out how many times this has happened before - for the acting categories, there have been 11 actors/actresses who were nominated in two different categories but never in the same category for two different films (i.e., Best Actress in a Leading Role for one film, and Best Actress in a Supporting Role for another film, to see the full list, click http://bit.ly/1RfnGcB).  On a hunch, I looked up John Williams and he has 5 years in which two of his Original Scores for different movies were nominated against each other.  In 1927, William Cameron Menzies was nominated for Production Design for two different films and in this category, it has happened a couple of times (mostly from what I can tell because there were like 10 guys doing all the production design for all the movies!). Suffice it to say, this isn't something that happens a lot and serious kudos to Durran.  (And would someone please get me out of this rabbit hole????  I could research this all day, and if I didn't have so many Oscars movies to see, I would!)

I'm always fascinated when film makers cast a fantastic actor with a decent voice (Emma Watson) for a musical, instead of a fantastic actor with a fantastic voice (Luke Evans, Josh Gad).  The thing that Emma Watson does accomplish is capturing the smart, strong, independent woman that is Belle, perhaps because we see time and time again that this captures who Emma Watson is in real life.

I think it's easy to enjoy this film when you don't overthink the plot too much.  We know that Gaston is the bad guy because he is only interested in Belle for her looks, but we also know that the happy ending doesn't exist for the Beast until he is good looking again.  There are a lot of these little justice problems that are easy to identify, but let's give Disney a "good on ya" for trying to make a film about a smart woman instead of just a pretty one.