On Sunday (March 15), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded F1 with the Oscar for Best Sound at the 98th Academy Awards.
The win landed Gareth John, Al Nelson, Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, Gary A. Rizzo and Juan Peralta golden statues.
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While some of the year’s most incredible films, including Sinners, One Battle After Another and Frankenstein all took home multiple awards, F1‘s award was another win for racing movies and the first in six years, since Ford v Ferrari at the 2020 awards.
F1 landed four nominations heading into the ceremony: Best Sound, Best Film Editing, Best Visual Effects and — unexpectedly — Best Picture. We’ve seen the Academy nominate at least one crowd-pleasing film for Picture a lot in recent years, but this one seemed to spark the most controversy.
The reactions to that specific nomination had a lot of ridicule and a lot of “it’s a movie about cars racing” overtones. While I don’t disagree that the plot of F1 is pretty standard, it’s such an excellent, immersive racing movie — arguably the best motorsports film to date on a technical level — that it balances out in a positive way.
I’ve also seen way too much criticism directed at the movie for being “unrealistic,” so I’m going to get on my soapbox for a second. This is the absolute funniest possible criticism of the movie, because what are blockbusters if not to be entertaining?
I don’t want a two-and-a-half-hour movie that plays like a real-life Formula 1 race weekend. I don’t want to see APXGP attempt Q1, finish 21st and 22nd, then run like garbage during the race and then repeat that process for the entire season. It’s more fun to watch Brad Pitt meddle with race outcomes and screw around on track.
I think it’s psychotic to want a blockbuster movie spotlighting one of the world’s premier racing series to be true-to-life in every single aspect. One, that’s not fun, and two, you’re not going to get new viewers that way.
Stepping down off my soapbox, F1 is a pretty fantastic summer blockbuster. Joseph Kosinski made it on the heels of Top Gun: Maverick a few years ago, and F1 won the same single award Maverick did (though Al Nelson was F1′s only sound editor carry-over from Maverick).
The win was the first Oscar for Whittle and Peralta. Nelson won for Maverick a few years ago; John scored his first Oscar last year for Dune: Part Two, and Rizzo won for two previous Christopher Nolan films, Inception and Dunkirk.
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F1 was the first racing movie to be nominated for an Oscar since 2019’s Ford v Ferrari, which picked up four nominations. The two films had three of the same nominations (Picture, Film Editing and Sound, though Ford v Ferrari had two Sound nominations when Sound Mixing and Sound Editing were two different categories).
I do think F1 should’ve won Visual Effects, as our own Michael Finley and I were talking about. Avatar: Fire and Ash won, but considering I’ve heard the third Avatar film isn’t much different than the first two, I feel like the Academy should’ve gone with something different (this is not just because I really don’t like Avatar movies).
Back in 2020, Ford v Ferrari did win Sound Editing, while 1917 took home Sound Mixing. That award is usually reserved for action movies or war movies, purely for the amount of balance that goes into making a movie sound good.
F1 continues the sound-winning trends of racing movies, because Grand Prix was the only other racing film to take home Oscar gold with wins in Sound Effects, Sound and Film Editing back in 1967.
I saw F1 in IMAX and it was one of my favorite films of the year. So glad it took home an Oscar.
