They’re Less Visible, Maybe, but They Are No Less Joyful

After having won Oscar nominations for the last four years, no one would blame Diane Warren if she slept through the announcement of nominees on Tuesday. But wearing one of the Oscar sweatshirts she received in previous years for luck, she popped out of bed at 3:30 a.m.

“I tell myself I’m not going to get excited, but at 3:30 your eyes pop open and you go to the TV,” she said, still buoyant several hours after learning she’d been nominated a fifth time.

But since best song nominees are not included on the televised announcements--”They get bogged down with unimportant categories like best movie and best actor and actress,” she joked--she learned of her nomination from a telephone call.

Warren wrote “Music of My Heart” for the Miramax movie “Music of the Heart,” which stars Meryl Streep. Previously Warren was nominated for songs from “Armageddon,” “Con Air,” “Up Close and Personal” and “Mannequin.”

“I’m a five-time nominee and so far I’m a four-time loser,” she said, laughing. “But maybe five times will be the charm.”

In the more visible acting and directing categories, much is made of people who have received multiple nominations over the years. But the number of nominations received by the most-honored thespians pales in comparison to the honors earned by luminaries in the behind-the-scenes categories.

John Williams, for example, who composed the score for “Angela’s Ashes,” received his 38th nomination this year. He has won previously for “Schindler’s List,” “E.T. The Extra-terrestrial,” “Star Wars,” “Jaws” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” He’s received more nominations than any other living person, but there are many other Oscar mainstays.

Dennis Muren, one of the visual effects supervisors for “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace,” received his 13th nomination Tuesday. He has won eight times. “You never get jaded,” he said. “They’re all amazing.”

Ben Burtt, the sound editor for “Phantom Menace,” who has won four times, couldn’t remember exactly how many nominations he’s received. “I can’t really count them,” he said. “There are probably 13 of them.”

Plenty of movie veterans still get excited when the nominations are announced and say it’s gratifying to be recognized by their peers, but most of them will tell you that their greatest satisfaction comes from the challenge of the work.

“Every ‘Star Wars’ film, because it’s a complete fantasy, requires the complex construction of a world of sound,” said Burtt, who has worked on each film of the series. “You can only record some dialogue when you’re shooting the movie.” The rest--the sounds of intergalactic weaponry, the hum of space vehicles, the peculiar growl or warble of alien species--all must be collected or created and then layered in.

The movie’s sound mixers, who work with the editors to create the overall aural architecture, also were nominated.

Among the veterans nominated Tuesday was Conrad Hall, cinematographer for “American Beauty.” The honor comes while he is working on the DVD re-release of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” for which he won his only Oscar 32 years ago. He has been nominated seven other times.

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Working with new digital technology on a movie from the past--and a movie that to him was all about the passing of an era and the inability of its heroes to come to terms with the future--put Hall, 73, into a contemplative mood.

His work for the DVD involved getting the new version of the movie to visually match the original. “I was trying to remember how it was 32 years ago and having a difficult time doing that,” he said.

He said he found “American Beauty’s” eight nominations particularly gratifying because the movie was made on a very low budget. “We all took less [salary] to do it because it was such a good script,” he said.

Because of his love for Alan Ball’s script, he said he found it “terribly disturbing” when he first saw director Sam Mendes’ final cut. “It almost killed me because it was so different from what we’d shot,” Hall said. “I’d say 40% of it was different.”

He soon realized that Mendes’ radical editing and reshuffling of scenes made the film much better.

“He had a clear vision of the film, which he projected to the acting, the photography and especially the editing process, which changed everything around from the script that was being shot and remade it into something more powerful in every way,” Hall said.

Another veteran who was nominated is John Dykstra, the visual effects supervisor for “Stuart Little.” Dykstra, who’s been in the business 30 years and has been nominated three times--he jokes that he started when he was 6--admits to being a little jaded by the hoopla of awards.

Dykstra was instrumental in creating George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic special effects company, for which he was awarded a Scientific and Technical Achievement Award from the academy in 1977. But the nomination for “Stuart Little” is special, he says, because unlike the big science fiction films he’s worked on, the work done on this film approaches invisibility.

“Three minutes into the movie, you forget that it’s a special effects film,” he said. “That’s what we were aiming for.”

But there also are plenty of nominees in behind-the-scenes categories who have never been nominated before. Among them is John Coleman, who said he felt a combination of “pins and needles and feeling like I want to jump up and down.” He was 13 when he watched the first “Star Wars” movie, and now he is part of the team nominated for the visual effects award for “Phantom Menace.”

The film was such a massive undertaking that four distinct teams prepared the visual effects. Coleman headed the animation team.

John Gaeta, who has worked on awarding-winning teams in the past, is nominated for the first time this year as a visual effects supervisor, for “The Matrix.”

The film was a perfect fit for him, says the 34-year-old Gaeta, because he grew up reading comic books and science fiction and watching MTV. “It’s funny how you can turn something that your mother said would ruin you as a person into something that’s good,” he said.

This also is the first nomination for Dante Spinotti, the cinematographer for “The Insider,” though it is his fourth film with director Michael Mann, whose film “The Manhunter” was the Italian-born Spinotti’s first film made in the United States.

He praised Mann for his clear vision in creating a look for “The Insider” that the director calls “false cinema verite.”

“It has a very real, very documentary feel, but as a matter of fact everything was controlled and directed in such a way that it would achieve a particular emotional state,” Spinotti said.