With the awards season racing forward, another guild has announced their top choices for the best in filmmaking in 2014. The winners of the 65th American Cinema Editors Awards (ACE Eddies) were announced Friday evening adding another voice to the crowded conversation. Voted on by members of the Editors Guild, the ACE Eddies honor the best achievements in film editing. The ACE Eddies come on the heels of last weekend’s busy start to the guild season, where the Producers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild announced their annual prizes. Both guilds picked Birdman, yet the ACE Eddies went in a different way awarding Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, potentially adding another degree of drama to a race short on frontrunners.
Boyhood, edited by Sandra Adair (the only female in the category). won in the dramatic feature film category in a rich field that included American Sniper, Gone Girl, The Imitation Game, Nightcrawler and Whiplash. The film likely had an edge with editors due the fact that the movie was shot over the course of twelve years– the film received an Oscar nominated for Best Film Editing as well. Over on the comedy side, The Grand Budapest Hotel, edited by Barney Pilling, won out over Birdman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Into the Woods and Inherent Vice. The period comedy, set at a fictional Eastern European resort, is also nominated in the same category at the Oscars. Oscar snub The LEGO Movie won the prize for animated feature, and Oscar frontrunner Citizenfour won for Documentary Feature.
It is striking that the ACE Eddies ignored guild powerful Birdman, considering the films’ shot-in-one-take conceit required such a splashy use of cuts. Even more striking, Birdman, despite earning 9 Oscar nominations, failed to even earn a Film Editing nomination, something which hinders its position as a Best Picture frontrunner (no film has won Best Picture without a Best Film Editing nomination since Ordinary People back in 1981.) Last year, the ACE Eddies awarded American Hustle and Captain Phillips; Gravity won the Oscar in the end. Below are the full list of ACE Eddie film winners:
- BEST FILM EDITING (Drama)- Boyhood– Sandra Adair
- BEST FILM EDITING (Musical or Comedy)- The Grand Budapest Hotel– Barney Pilling
- BEST FILM EDITING (Animated Feature)- The LEGO Movie– David Burrows, Chris McKay
- BEST FILM EDITING (Documentary)- Citizenfour– Mathilde Bonnefoy
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