With this handy Oscar guide, you won't have to own a pair of black-framed hipster glasses to fake your way through the Academy's many not-so-exciting technical categories on the big night.
Why is Cinematography not the same thing as Directing? What's the difference between the Sound Mixing and Sound Editing categories? What’s the secret to predicting the Best Costume category?
We've got your answers in this convenient Oscar breakdown.
Cinematography
Most people are generally aware of what a director does. He or she is the boss, telling everyone what to do and how to do it to make the movie happen.
The cinematographer is the camera-only version of a director. Cinematographers are in charge of capturing the visuals in a film, meaning everything from camera angles and lighting to colour and makeup.
A good cinematographer can make a film really pop off the screen with a distinct and obvious visual style. For instance, 2014 Oscar winner ‘Gravity’ felt like a rollercoaster ride in space with its lazy long shots and still moments interspersed with bursts of chaotic action and spinning. The camera moved slow when George Clooney’s character puttered around in his jetpack, but spun and twirled when Sandra Bullock character was sent hurtling into deep space.
This year’s visually striking ‘Grand Budapest Hotel’ stands out in this category, but it will have competition from the likes of ‘Birdman,’ ‘Ida,’ ‘Mr. Turner’ and ‘Unbroken.’
Watch how the cinematographer for ‘Mr. Turner’ makes you feel like you’re following the film’s character around in this clip from the film. The camera stays on one continuous shot for about 80 seconds, tracking J.M.W. Turner (Timothy Spall) as he moves around a busy room full of people coming and going. Not only does it make the viewer feel like you’re following Turner, but it also transports you to another time – namely, the early 1800s.
Visual Effects
Space, apes and superheroes. The visual effects category typically includes a rundown of blockbuster films from the year that was, and this year's nominees are no exception.
Christopher Nolan's 'Interstellar' created a black hole on screen. 'Dawn of the Planet of the Apes' transformed real actors into primates through motion-capture and computer-generated imaging. 'X-Men: Days of Future Past' dropped a football stadium on top of the White House, while 'Captain America: The Winter Soldier' destroyed a skyscraper and several giant hover planes.
But 'Guardians of the Galaxy' probably has the edge in this category thanks to Rocket and Groot, the film's CGI duo of a talking raccoon and his sentient tree sidekick.
Film Editing
On a basic level, film editing refers to how a movie stitches together individual camera shots to make it look like something is happening in sequence.
If it's an action movie, for instance, a film editor is in charge of making it look like one character has shot another. The editor will take footage of one character pointing a gun, then cut it with a close-up of the gun, then quickly show the shooting victim stumbling back. Maybe we get a close-up of the victim's surprised face, or of the bullet wound in his stomach.
One actor didn't really shoot the other to create the scene. It was put together from separate shots, and the editor made it look like one action.
There are plenty of these "shooting" sequences in nominee 'American Sniper,' but film editing doesn't just apply to action movies. It's in every film you've ever seen. Any time the camera changes to a different angle, a film editor made that choice.
'The Grand Budapest Hotel' is more drama than action movie, but the film editor's hand is obvious, if you know where to look. Scenes end abruptly, the camera changes angles at odd points and the whole film moves along at a jarring, urgent pace, as though you're being rushed along and you don't quite know what's happening around you.
Other nominees for this category include 'The Imitation Game,' 'Whiplash,' 'Boyhood' and the previously mentioned 'American Sniper.' Because guns.
Costume Design
This one's pretty straightforward. The Oscar for Best Costume Design typically goes to period films with extravagant outfits. If it includes princesses or petticoats, it's likely to get a nomination.
Past winners include visually spectacular throwbacks like 'The Great Gatsby,' 'The Young Victoria,' 'Memoirs of a Geisha' and 'The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.' Nine of the last 15 winning films have involved royalty of some kind, so keep that in mind with this year's 'Maleficent,' starring Angelina Jolie as the wicked Disney queen.
Others nominated in the category are 'Inherent Vice,' 'Into the Woods,' 'Mr. Turner' and 'The Grand Budapest Hotel.'
Makeup and Hairstyling
Another self-explanatory category, Best Makeup and Hairstyling only has three nominees this year. Marvel's comedic space opera 'Guardians of the Galaxy' is jam-packed with 50 shades of alien skin colours, while 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' goes for a little more subtly with its First World War-era look. The only other nominee in the wrestling film 'Foxcatcher,' featuring a hardly-recognizable Steve Carell sporting a big prosthetic nose.
Production Design
Production design is the physical environment of the film, though it can also incorporate visual effects insofar as how they influence the overall backdrop.
As a general rule, think about the film's setting. Does it look real? Does it transport the viewer into the film world? Is it visually exciting?
This year has nominees from a mixed bag of genres. Realistic period pieces like 'The Grand Budapest Hotel,' 'Mr. Turner' and 'The Imitation Game' are up against more effects-heavy competition in the form of the fairy tale-inspired 'Into the Woods' and the space travel film 'Interstellar.'
Sound Mixing
Here's a spoiler: most of the sounds you hear in a movie don't actually happen while the actors are performing their lines. Whether it be an explosion, a spaceship engine, a passing car or background conversation at a café, those sounds are added in post-production and then layered together at just the right volume to make them all sound natural.
Take a city street, for example. What individual sounds come together to make that street sound busy? A sound mixer is in charge of putting in all the tiny sounds you might take for granted while standing on a city street. That means everything from car engines and truck horns to footsteps and conversations on the other side of the road.
Watch this clip from 'Birdman' and listen to the sounds. Pay attention to how the audio changes as Michael Keaton's character leaves the loud stage and walks through the back hallways of the theatre where he's staging his play.
WARNING: this clip contains harsh language.
Sound Editing
A sound editor is in charge of accumulating all the sounds used in a movie. That may sound like a simple task, but it's far more complicated than sticking a microphone all over the film set.
For instance, what does a dragon sound like? Or an orc?
For fantasy films like nominee 'The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies,' sound editors need to invent effects for creatures and places that don't exist – and they have to do it using objects from the real world.
Sound editing in film is like refereeing in sport. If you don't notice it, it's probably being done well. Thus, if everything sounds natural in a film, the sound editor is doing a bang-up job.
Watch the following clip from 'The Hobbit' and think about all the sounds someone has to come up with to make a marching army of orcs sound real. Aside from the animal grunts of the orcs themselves, there's the clink of thousands of sets of metal armour to consider, along with the all the necessary noises for purely CGI objects. For instance, you can hear all the little creaks and groans of the catapults before they're fired at the end of the clip, even though those catapults are computer-generated.
A sound editor made them sound real.
Other nominees in this category include 'Interstellar,' 'Birdman,' 'American Sniper' and 'Unbroken.'
