The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - 3 nominations

Costume Design - Mary Zophres
Original Song "When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings" - Music and Lyric by David Rawlings and Gillian Welch
Adapted Screenplay - Written by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

The Ballad of Buster Scrubbs is a compilation of six vignettes with stories from the old West.  The first was my favorite about a very lucky and amiable singing cowboy (lucky... until he wasn't), a bank robber who doesn't quite make it out of the situation, a traveling entertainment salesman with an odd companion, a prospector for gold who forgets that others also want the gold he seeks, a sweet tale about pioneers heading west and a young woman looking for love, and a stagecoach with bounty hunters on board traveling to the same destination as other passengers in the car.  

The film was a bit uneven - some of the stories that were great (especially the singing cowboy and the young woman on the caravan), and then others that didn't have a point to make.  Death is the link between the stories, reminding us that the old West was not an easy place to survive.

It's wonderful to see a cowboy film receive a costume design nomination.  It's not that the costumes stand out in the ways that Victorian or Elizabethan costumes do, but in their perfection for the time, they are as deserving as any period piece would be.  Truly the standout nominee for this film is the Original Song.  It was sweet, funny, and perfect for the first vignette.  It actually gave me hope that the whole movie was a musical, because of how exactly the song worked for piece.  (Sadly, not a musical.  Boo.)

I enjoyed the film right up until the last short story.  Five of the six were so entertaining, but that last one (despite having great actors like Tyne Daly in it) made absolutely no sense to me.  I still can't quite figure out the point, and I watched it twice.  My recommendation is to enjoy the first five stories and move on.


View the trailer:

Listen to the Original Song: