For our seventh Rundown article, we look at the foundation of a film’s look and feel. After the jump, you’ll find our winner and runner-up predictions for Best Production Design as well as general commentary about the race. Wednesday, we’ll cover the category that most closely aligns with Best Picture that isn’t Best Film Editing.

Best Production Design

Winner Predictions

• Bridge of Spies (PP R) [New]
• The Danish Girl
• Mad Max: Fury Road (WL O) (TB O) (TL R) [New]
• The Martian
• The Revenant

Runner-Up Predictions

• Bridge of Spies (WL O)
• The Danish Girl (TB R) [New]
• The Martian (PP R) [New](TL R) [New]

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Wesley Lovell: The opulent beauty of a period drama has often inspired many a voter in this category and all things considered, that is what they’ll likely pick this year. However, if you look at the winners of the Art Directors Guild awards, you’ll discover that this year’s competition leaders are anything but. The Revenant is set largely in the American west, a vast wilderness of forests and ramshackle encampments. Mad Max: Fury Road is a visceral, desolate wasteland of scrounged parts and machinery. The Martian takes place on an isolated, deserted landscape. All of them have large set pieces, but none of them are the typical glossy affair that’s typically recognized here. Either this gives The Danish Girl and Bridge of Spies a leg up, or we’ll see a rather dramatic shift in the paradigm, if briefly, of this category. The question here is whether The Revenant is going to sweep and if it can beat current frontrunner Mad Max: Fury Road this could be one of the early contests where we discover just how much strength either film has going into the final categories.
Peter J. Patrick: Anything can happen with this category, but the award usually goes to the nominee with the most authentic look for the period in which the film takes place. That should signal a win for either Bridge of Spies or The Danish Girl rather than the largely imagined locales of the other three nominees. Of those, though, The Martian creates a pleasing life on Mars concept never seen in previous films taking place on the Red Planet and would be a good choice. I do think, however, that nostalgia for the 1950s designs of Bridge of Spies will prevail.
Tripp Burton: The Academy doesn’t usually go to far into science fiction for this award, and they also tend to go for the beautiful over the dirty, so I am reluctant in predicting Mad Max here. It won the ADG award, along with The Martian and The Revenant, but that isn’t always a necessity here (Alice in Wonderland and Lincoln both won a few years ago without an ADG win), so I think The Danish Girl could be a real dark horse sleeper here.
Thomas La Tourrette: Three of the five nominated films won guild awards, so it is not so easy to predict what will win. My guess is that it will go to Mad Max, but I am not so certain of this. The designers basically got to create a post-apocalyptic world, which should make for an easy win, though the designers of The Martian got to create a new world, space ships and lots of NASA labs. The third guild winner, The Revenant, would not seem a likely winner here, but I would not have expected it to triumph against films that had many more sets on hand. Both The Danish Girl and Bridge of Spies lost out to The Revenant at the guild awards, so I doubt they can triumph here. Conceivably The Revenant may sweep through the awards, but I would place it in third place to win due to its paucity of sets. I will predict Mad Max to triumph, with The Martian close behind.

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