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]
History
This award was first given for films released in 1934. The name of this award is occasionally changed; in 2008, it was listed as the Academy Award for Achievement in Film Editing.
Four film editors have won this award three times in their career:
To date, two film directors have won this award: James Cameron and Alfonso Cuarón, for the films Titanic and Gravity, respectively. Directors David Lean, Steve James, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (under the alias "Roderick Jaynes"), Michel Hazanavicius, Jean-Marc Vallée (under the alias "John Mac McMurphy"), and Chloé Zhao have been nominated for editing their own films as well, with Cameron, Cuarón, and the Coens each being nominated for the award twice. Also, Best Film Editing winner, Walter Murch, although known for film editing and sound, directed the Oscar nominated Return to Oz, and is, to date, the only person with Oscars for both sound engineering and film editing—winning them in the same year for his work on The English Patient.
The following editors have received multiple nominations for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing. This list is sorted by the number of total awards won (with the number of total nominations listed in parentheses).
^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.
^ ab"Rule Thirteen—Special Rules for the Film Editing Award". 79th Academy Awards Rules for Distinguished Achievements in 2006. Archived from the original on July 18, 2010. 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".
