The Cinema Audio Society Awards (CAS) honor sound mixing teams. It’s the final guild award ceremony before the Oscars next week.
Dunkirk, Game of Thrones and Black Mirror all took home prizes Saturday night. The CAS awards are presented for both live action films and animated features.
Best Sound Mixing
The Cinema Audio Society Awards 2023 celebrates the best sound mixing achievements. It’s an important award to the industry and is a sign of how far film sound has come in recent years.
The CAS has also recently started giving a live-action category for its awards, which is a great idea. In this year’s nominations, we see teams behind The Hurt Locker, Avatar, Precious: Based on a True Story, Black Panther and Babylon all getting their chance to shine.
In animated features, we have Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (scored by Alexandre Desplat), Lightyear, Minions: The Rise of Gru, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and Turning Red. And in feature docs, we’ve got Good Night Oppy; Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song; Louis Armstrong’s Black and Blues; Moonage Daydream and The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari.
Best Original Score
The best original score is a tough call this year. The Cinema Audio Society awards are being handed out in seven categories, including live action, animated, documentary, and television movies and mini-series.
In the live action category, the CAS award is going to a team led by Daniel Kresco for Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front (the song that was) and Simon Rhodes for James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water (the score that was). In the animated film category, a number of scoring mixers received a nomination – Peter Cobbin for Netflix’s Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, Warren Brown for Pixar’s Lightyear, Alan Meyerson for Illumination Entertainment’s Minions: The Rise of Gru and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and Chris Fogel for Disney’s Turning Red.
Best Original Song
The CAS (Cinema Audio Society) has announced their coveted honors for the year in the live action motion picture category. Among the best-of-the-best nods are All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun: Maverick. The society also lauded the likes of Pinocchio, Lightyear and Minions: The Rise of Gru in their respective categories. In the feature doc department, Good Night Oppy, Hallelujah and Black and Blues made the grade. It’s a good thing there are so many worthy competitors. The aforementioned All Quiet on the Western Front nudges the cake with an impressive six nominations in the live action competition. The aforementioned top tier in the animated motion picture category was also a close call with five entries. The best tally for the year is six for the live action category and four in the animated.
Best Sound Editing
In the Best Sound Editing category, the Cinema Audio Society gave the crowd-pleasing rock biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” its top prize. It also gave top honors to the re-recording, ADR and foley teams behind Netflix’s “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
Meanwhile, Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion animation “Pinocchio” and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s surreal film “Bardo” both nabbed MPSE nominations in the Feature Music Editing and Documentary Music Editing categories.
Five-time Oscar-nominated production sound mixer Peter J. Devlin was presented with the CAS Career Achievement Award. The 59th CAS Awards are set to be held March 4 in Downtown Los Angeles.
Worst Sound Mixing
The CAS Awards honor sound mixing teams for their achievements in film and television. This year, the CAS presented sound mixing awards for Dunkirk, Game of Thrones and Black Mirror.
As a bellwether for the Academy Awards, six of the past 10 CAS Award winners have gone on to receive Oscar nominations in the same category. James Mangold’s “Ford v Ferrari” has emerged as one of this year’s most highly nominated live-action movies.
Among the other nominees were “Birdman,” “Toy Story 4,” “Joker” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” Re-recording mixer Tom Fleishman is set to win this year’s CAS Career Achievement Award. Lastly, director James Mangold earned the CAS Filmmaker Award. The 55th Annual CAS Awards will be held on Saturday, February 16 at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown in the Wilshire Grand Ballroom.