In this week’s Friday Know-It-All, Editor Ira gets us ready for Oscars weekend with a dive into some less well-known Academy Award winners and nominees.
A big part of writing for Trivia Mafia is staying aware of upcoming cultural events, annual observances, and other corners of the calendar. Late February usually means we’re working up a lot of rounds about both Black History Month and the Oscars, two topics that have overlapped more in recent years than they used to.
We’ve run plenty of rounds celebrating well-known Oscar winners such as Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Jordan Peele, and Jennifer Hudson, but there are also plenty of lower-key honorees whose contributions have stayed largely behind the scenes. For today’s Black History Month Friday Know-It-All, let’s dig into the stories of a few undersung winners and nominees in less-celebrated Oscars categories.
Willie D. Burton, Best Sound Mixing
Sound mixing is one of those film jobs that often goes unnoticed when it’s done well, but is unmistakable when it’s done poorly. Sound mixers have the tricky task of recording and mixing dialogue and location sounds in real time. While a lot of sound-related jobs are performed in post-production, the sound mixer is responsible for making sure the volume and quality of the on-set recordings are usable and easy to work with.
Since the 1970s, Willie D. Burton has been recognized as having some of the best ears in the business. A sound aficionado from an early age, Burton studied electronics at Compton City College in L.A. and operated sonar in the U.S. Navy before becoming the first Black member of the International Sound Technicians Union in 1969. He started out in lower-level sound jobs in television and worked his way up to film, getting his big break mixing sound on Sidney Poitier’s hit comedy “Let’s Do It Again” in 1975.
Burton earned his first Oscar nomination in 1978 for “The Buddy Holly Story,” where he had the unenviable task of making audible sense of Gary Busey. His first Oscar win came for mixing another music biopic, Clint Eastwood’s 1988 movie “Bird,” starring Forest Whitaker as jazz icon Charlie Parker. He won a second Academy Award for “Dreamgirls” in 2006, and a nomination for 2023’s “Oppenheimer” tied him with Quincy Jones as the most-nominated Black artist in Oscars history, with seven. You’ve also heard his work in the likes of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” “Se7en,” and “WarGames.”
Hannah Beachler, Best Production Design
A production designer is regarded as the person most responsible for the overall look and feel of a movie. It’s a role that requires skills in creative design, project management, financial management, planning, and communication. That’s a lot of hats to wear, which makes someone who can balance them all one of a film’s most valuable assets. When a movie’s production design is on point, it shows in a distinctive vibe that makes for some iconic imagery.
There aren’t many more iconic designs in recent Hollywood history than the Afrofuturist nation of Wakanda, as envisioned by production designer Hannah Beachler. The child of an interior designer and an architect (go figure), Beachler started making no-budget indie movies in college. She was still on the indie circuit when she collaborated with first-time director Ryan Coogler on 2013’s harrowing “Fruitvale Station,” a film that went on to be one of the year’s most acclaimed and launched both of their careers. Beachler has since worked with Coogler on “Creed” and both “Black Panther” films, Beyoncé on “Lemonade” and “Renaissance,” Barry Jenkins on “Moonlight,” and Steven Soderbergh on “No Sudden Move.”
To realize her vision of the fictional African utopia from 2018’s “Black Panther,” Beachler assembled a 515-page “set bible” laying out everything from the country’s geological landscape to the history of its buildings to its favorite foods. Her in-depth planning paid off in arguably the most celebrated and visually striking movie in the Marvel canon, and one that made her the first Black production designer to win the Oscar.
Ruth E. Carter, Best Costume Design
“Costume designer” might seem like a fairly straightforward job title, but in Hollywood it generally means a lot more than just designing costumes. A costume designer is also responsible for sourcing materials, supervising clothing creation, and collaborating with the wardrobe department. Their designs are a key element of cinematic storytelling, a way for audiences to tell at a glance what a character is all about.
Ruth E. Carter has outfitted many of the most memorable characters in the past half-century of cinema. She learned to sew at a local Boys & Girls Club when she was 9, a skill she later combined with her love of theater. Carter met up-and-coming director Spike Lee while working with a Los Angeles theater company in the late '80s. She became the costume designer for much of Lee’s catalog, including “Do the Right Thing,” “Crooklyn,” and “Malcolm X,” the latter of which earned her the first of her four Oscar nominations.
She’s worked with a who’s who of Black directors from the '90s to today, including John Singleton, Ava DuVernay, Robert Townsend, Lee Daniels, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Ernest R. Dickerson, Reginald Hudlin, and, of course, Ryan Coogler. Carter brought home the Oscar for her indelible work on “Black Panther,” then nabbed a second for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” becoming the first Black woman to win two Oscars in any category.
Hugh A. Robertson, Best Film Editing
Any time a three-hour movie gets nominated for Best Film Editing, you’ll hear the same joke from the dullest wit in the room: “Wow, I didn’t even think that movie HAD an editor!” Setting aside the ghastly assumption that editing is synonymous with abbreviating, the idea that an editor’s main role is just to decide what doesn’t belong in a movie is way off. A film editor assembles a movie’s footage to ensure that it’s coherent, creative, and engaging for the eye and the mind.
Nowadays that’s done mainly with computers, but back when Hugh A. Robertson was coming up, it was a manual process that required cutting and splicing physical strips of film. It was painstaking, eye-straining work, but a skilled editor could dictate the pace and tone of a film more than nearly any other creative. The Brooklyn-born son of Jamaican immigrants, Robertson landed a summer job with a small film studio as a teen and never looked back. After serving in the Signal Corps in World War II, he studied film at the Sorbonne. He later joined the Negro Actor’s Guild in New York and became the first Black member of the Motion Picture Editors Union in 1960.
Robertson’s career as an editor was brief but remarkable. In 1959, he worked as an assistant editor on “Come Back Africa,” a groundbreaking guerrilla film shot in secret in South Africa as a protest against the apartheid government. He worked as a sound editor through the early '60s and got his widest exposure in 1969 as the film editor on John Schlesinger’s controversial hit “Midnight Cowboy.” That film became the only X-rated movie ever to win Best Picture, and Robertson became the first Black editor to be nominated for an Oscar. His next editing gig was Gordon Parks’ possibly even more impactful 1971 “Shaft,” a huge hit that helped define an era of Black filmmaking.
Robertson moved on to directing television shows and low-budget feature films before relocating to Trinidad in 1973. He established a film school and dedicated the rest of his career to building a Trinidadian film industry, directing a number of movies and TV shows in his adopted homeland. He was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1982, a pioneer on multiple fronts.
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