2023 Oscars Best Film Editing nominees: 1 past champ versus 5 rookies
The films in the running for the 2023 Best Film Editing Oscar are “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Elvis,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “TAR,” and “Top Gun: Maverick.” Our current odds indicate that “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (10/3) is the frontrunner, followed in order by “Top Gun: Maverick” (37/10), “Elvis” (9/2), “The Banshees of Inisherin” (9/2), and “TAR” (9/2).
Five of the six individual cutters competing for the gold this year are first-time nominees, making for the category’s highest newcomer rate since 2018. In that case, Lee Smith emerged victorious on his third bid for “Dunkirk.” The current group of rookies consists of Eddie Hamilton (“Top Gun: Maverick”), Paul Rogers (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), Monika Willi (“TAR”), and “Elvis” duo Jonathan Redmond and Matt Villa.
Redmond and Villa would be the 18th pair of editors to win this award together and the third to do so within the last decade, after Alfonso Cuarón and Mark Sanger (“Gravity,” 2014) and Andrew Buckland and Michael McCusker (“Ford v Ferrari,” 2020). This would mark the seventh instance of both members of a winning editing duo being Oscars newcomers, with the last having involved married couple Chris Innis and Bob Murawski (“The Hurt Locker”) in 2010.
Willi would be this category’s 14th female champion, following a precedent originally set by Anne Bauchens (“North West Mounted Police”) in 1941. Aside from Innis, the only other women who have triumphed here within the last three decades are Thelma Schoonmaker (“The Aviator,” 2005 and “The Departed,” 2007) and Margaret Sixel (“Mad Max: Fury Road,” 2016).
The only returning nominee in this year’s lineup is Mikkel E. G. Nielsen (“The Banshees of Inisherin”), who triumphed on his initial bid for “Sound of Metal” in 2021. Another victory would make him the 17th person to pull off two in this category and the first to do so since Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall won as a duo for “The Social Network” (2011) and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (2012).
The last nine films that have taken this award have also been honored for their sound, and either “Elvis” or “Top Gun: Maverick” could keep the tradition going. The last time this overlap did not occur was in 2013 when “Argo” won the editing prize but lost the Best Sound Editing race to “Skyfall” and “Zero Dark Thirty” and the Best Sound Mixing one to “Les Misérables.” Those two sound categories were merged into one ahead of the 2021 ceremony.
The films that won in this category most recently are “Dune” (2022), “Sound of Metal” (2021), “Ford v Ferrari” (2020), and “Bohemian Rhapsody” (2019). This year’s winner will be revealed during the 95th Academy Awards ceremony, airing March 12 on ABC.
Make your predictions at Gold Derby now. Download our free and easy app for Apple/iPhone devices or Android (Google Play) to compete against legions of other fans plus our experts and editors for best prediction accuracy scores. See our latest prediction champs. Can you top our esteemed leaderboards next? Always remember to keep your predictions updated because they impact our latest racetrack odds, which terrify Hollywood chiefs and stars. Don’t miss the fun. Speak up and share your huffy opinions in our famous forums where 5,000 showbiz leaders lurk every day to track latest awards buzz. Everybody wants to know: What do you think? Who do you predict and why?
SIGN UP for Gold Derby’s free newsletter with latest predictions