No Country, There Will Be Blood, Golden Compass Win Art Directors Awards

I get a kick from guild awards shows, particularly the art directors, because they not only celebrate the current year's best--No Country for Old Men took the contemporary prize, There Will Be Blood the period, and The Golden Compass the fantasy--but they look to the past to honor the pioneers who went before. At Saturday night's 12th annual production design awards, the art director's guild showed stills, designs and clips from veterans of the past entering the ADG Hall of Fame, as well as this year's Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Stuart Craig (right).

The ADG set up the Beverly Hilton's grand ballroom as an old-fashioned night club with low-key table lighting and the Johnny Crawford Orchestra crooning classic songs from Astaire/Rogers musicals. Comedy writer/actor Harry Shearer made a witty host. "This is the first awards show where the people up here who are not amusing can't blame it on the Writers Strike," he joked.

The art directors raised a toast to Robert F. Boyle, the famed production designer who is the first in 67 years, since John William Cameron Menzies in 1940, to win an honorary Oscar. The 98-year-old Boyle (North by Northwest, The Birds, Fiddler on the Roof) took a bow during the evening's first standing ovation. Later in the evening wheelchair-bound author Ray Bradbury honored stop-motion FX pioneer Ray Harryhausen (Jason and the Argonauts, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad), the best man at his wedding 60 years before, with an award for outstanding cinematic imagery. "I've seen his art develop," Bradbury said. "It had nothing to do with money, it was his ability to recreate dinosaurs."

"I never thought starting in my garage making funny stories for children would ever lead to this," Harryhausen said. Computer graphics, he admitted, "would have saved us somewhat. We did it the hard way."

Brit production designer Terence Marsh (A Bridge Too Far, The Shawshank Redemption) recalled that when he first brought his protege Craig to work with him on Scrooge, while he was a promising young man, Craig "did not know much about drafting," he said. But Craig came along, and eventually earned eight Oscar noms and three Oscar wins (Gandhi, The English Patient and Dangerous Liaisons). Most recently he designed all the Harry Potter movies. Craig cited the "unwinnable battle for the perfect production design that only you can ever know when it's good enough. Failure hurts and it kind of hurts forever. You do learn how to rule out compromise. I'm failing better these days."

Here are Sunday's Cinema Audio Society sound awards. And here's Kris Tapley on same. No Country for Old Men is winning everything--UPDATE--well, not everything. The Bourne Ultimatum and Sweeney Todd took top honors Sunday at the EDDIES, the American Cinema Editors awards.

The full list of ADG winners is on the jump:

WINNERS:

EXCELLENCE IN PRODUCTION DESIGN FOR A FEATURE FILM IN 2007:

Period Film

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Jack Fisk

Fantasy Film

THE GOLDEN COMPASS

Dennis Gassner

Contemporary Film

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Jess Gonchor

EXCELLENCE IN PRODUCTION DESIGN IN TELEVISION FOR 2007:

Single Camera Television Series

MAD MEN

Dan Bishop

Episode 9 “Shoot”

Multi-Camera Television Series

MAD TV

John Sabato

Episode 1221 “Mad TV”

Television Movie or Mini-Series

PU-239

Tom Meyer

Awards Show, Variety, Music, or Non- Fiction Program

HELL'S KITCHEN - Episode 301

John R. Janavs

EXCELLENCE IN PRODUCTION DESIGN FOR COMMERCIALS FOR 2007

BUDWEISER

Jeremy Reed

Title: “Space Station”