Academy Award for Best Film Editing

Academy Award for Best Film Editing
CountryUnited States
Presented byAcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS)
First awarded1935
Most recent winnerJennifer Lame
Oppenheimer (2023)
Websiteoscars.org
Thelma Schoonmaker (left) and Columba Powell (right) at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Schoonmaker is among the deans of film editing; Powell is the son of Michael Powell, a prominent film director to whom Schoonmaker was married until his death in 1990.
Conrad A. Nervig was the inaugural winner, winning for Eskimo (1933). He also won for King Solomon's Mines (1950), alongside Ralph E. Winters.

The Academy Award for Best Film Editing is one of the annual awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). Nominations for this award are closely correlated with the Academy Award for Best Picture. For 33 consecutive years, 1981 to 2013, every Best Picture winner had also been nominated for the Film Editing Oscar, and about two thirds of the Best Picture winners have also won for Film Editing.[1][2] Only the principal, "above the line" editor(s) as listed in the film's credits are named on the award; additional editors, supervising editors, etc. are not currently eligible.[3]

The nominations for this Academy Award are determined by a ballot of the voting members of the Editing Branch of the academy; there were 220 members of the Editing Branch in 2012.[4] The members may vote for up to five of the eligible films in the order of their preference; the five films with the largest vote totals are selected as nominees.[3] The Academy Award itself is selected from the nominated films by a subsequent ballot of all active and life members of the academy. This process is essentially the reverse of that of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA); nominations for the BAFTA Award for Best Editing are done by a general ballot of academy voters, and the winner is selected by members of the editing chapter.[5]

  1. ^ Harris, Mark (January 6, 2008). "Which Editing is a Cut Above?". The New York Times. In 1980, Ordinary People won as Best Picture, but its editor Jeff Kanew was not nominated for Best Editing.
  2. ^ Dimond, Anna (December 13, 2013). "Why Editing Nominations Predict the Best Picture Oscar". Variety. Interviews with prominent film editors exploring the correlation between the Academy Awards for Best Film Editing and for Best Film.
  3. ^ a b "Rule Thirteen—Special Rules for the Film Editing Award". 79th Academy Awards Rules for Distinguished Achievements in 2006. Archived from the original on 2010-07-18. Rules are published for each year's awards. In earlier years, different rules applied; thus Robert Parrish was nominated for All the King's Men (1949) with a credit as an "editorial consultant".
  4. ^ "Academy Branches". Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. February 2012. Archived from the original on 2012-02-24.
  5. ^ "Orange British Academy Film Awards: Rules and Guidelines 2008-2009" (PDF). British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-28.