Our final article this week is also the final category that has no professional guild representation. This week’s articles have all featured categories where there are few historical precursors that help us with our predictions.

KEY:

MAKEUP

• Barney’s Version
• The Way Back
• The Wolfman (O) (H) (O) (O)

Runners-Up

• Barney’s Version (H) (H)
• The Way Back (H) (H)

Wesley Lovell: This is such a hard category to predict sometimes. This branch goes out of its way to pick non-Best Picture contenders as frequently as possible. A few sneak in here and there, but for the most part, nominees in this category are either long forgotten or weren’t terribly prominent to begin with. These three nominees represent their films’ only nominations, which makes it hard to know which way the Academy will go, but for a very long while now, the Academy rewards this prize for not only the most makeup work, but also the one that features the most prosthetics. In this situation, it would seem that this would be The Wolfman’s to lose. Not only is it a heavy and showy use of prosthetics, the work was accomplished by legendary makeup artist Rick Baker. That may very well cement his win.

But look out for The Way Back, which uses a lot of makeup and has frequent Oscar nomiene Yolanda Toussieng on staff. And if there’s a makeup artist with any chance of beating Baker, it’s Toussieng. Then again, never count out Golden Globe winner Barney’s Version, but I really think Baker is the key to predicting this race. He’s won 6 Oscars out of 12 nominations. As a comparison Toussieng has 2 Oscars out of four nominations.

Peter J. Patrick: Rick Baker has been nominated twelve times and won six. I sense a seventh for The Wolfman. If they want to give the award to someone new, Andre Morot (Barney’s Version) has never been nominated before, while the team behind The Way Back has. In any case, I don’t think it’s much of a contest.

Tripp Burton: This is the rare category where this is the sole citation for all of the films nominated in this category. That means that the category becomes a little harder to judge; we can’t assume it will go to the film that is the most loved, or get swept up in a major sweep, because all of these films proved unpopular enough to pop up elsewhere on the ballot. When this happens, the award tends to go to the film with the most obvious makeup (see How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe), and here that is The Wolfman. The fact that the film was done by Rick Baker, who has six awards in this category already, makes it an even safer bet. If something were to upset it, though, I would guess it would be the weathering effects of The Way Back over the aging effects of Barney’s Vision.