Constructor: Jeremy Newton
Relative difficulty: Medium (if you don't know film titles, maybe harder)
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THEME: "Hollywood Remakes"— Theme answers are sounded-out / wacky versions of movie titles. The puzzle seems to be alleging that all the movies involved were OSCAR WINNERs for SOUND MIXING (30D: What you get upon reading aloud the answers to the seven italicized clues / 46D: Category for which every 30-Down in this puzzle was recognized, aptly). But they weren't. Not one of them. Rather, they all won for Best Sound (more below):
Theme answers:
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This is a layered and inventive puzzle, probably very challenging to put together, architecturally, but ... as a solver, yikes. Physically painful from start to finish. Not even groan-worthy. I was mostly just wincing. The "puns" absolutely tortured the life out of the puzzle, and me. And the fill, over and over, made me shake my head at how bad and/or tin-eared it was. DOADUET !!!?!?!?! ??!??! ???! That makes EAT A SANDWICH look like *gold*. NODS ... OUT!? Not OFF but OUT? And XOO?! We're still doing losing tic-tac-toe lines in 2023, are we? Woof, BAD KARMA, for sure (ironically, this was probably the very best answer in this grid). Who is "Daisy" that I'm saying "GOOD GIRL" to her? An ... imaginary? ... dog? Is Daisy an iconic dog name? Did I miss that? When did that happen? DMING ADMIN AWMAN STANG HONG is ... well, it's kind of fun to say, but AW, MAN what an unappealing little (SW) corner that is. Further, the cluing on the revealers—it's so awkward and inexact. So ... SOUND MIXING ... is the (and I quote the puzzle now) "category for which every OSCAR WINNER in this puzzle was recognized"??? This makes no sense at a simple grammatical level, as the Oscar *is* the recognition, so though the movies were certainly recognized for SOUND MIXING, they were not in fact OSCAR WINNERsuntil they were so recognized. Further furthermore, while SOUND MIXING was in fact an Oscar "category" for 17 years (2003-2019), none, zero, not a one of these movies came out in that window, and so None of Them Actually Won Oscars For Best SOUND MIXING (!?!?). Yes, "mixing" is part of what is being recognized by a Best Sound Oscar, but for the puzzle to be so specific about the category, which was, for a time, an actual category, and then to have None of the movies actually win in that category??? Bizarre. So the theme, in addition to being a punning war crime, is factually ... well, fuzzy. Look, if you love groaner puns, then perhaps this felt like winning the LOTTO to you, but except for the part where I got to remember David Bowie's "LET'S DANCE," I found it something close to excruciating. WALL-HUNG!?!?! I just ... I ... what? ... to whose ears is this sounding good?
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That's how quickly I knew this one was gonna be rough: CDT HAH ERE ... that's all it took. Now, the puzzle *could* have recovered from that small bit of inauspiciousness ... but it did not. The canary in the coal mine did not lie. Please note that in this early screenshot, I have CHESSMEN instead of the correct CHESS SET at 1A: King, queen, etc. Warts and all, that's what you get. That just shows you it's an actual real-time screenshot and not some reconstruction. I've neither the time nor the inclination to go back and hide my screw-ups. It's a small screw-up, anyway.
Relative difficulty: Medium (if you don't know film titles, maybe harder)
Theme answers:
- "THEIR RITE'S TOUGH" (i.e. "The Right Stuff") (22A: "That cult's initiation ceremony is brutal! [1983]) (Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Sound)
- "THAI TAN KNICK" (i.e. "Titanic") (32A: Bronzed New York basketball player from Bangkok [1997]) (Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Sound)
- "HELL OWED ALI" (i.e. "Hello, Dolly!") (49A: Why the Devil was forced to pay "The Greatest" [1969]) (Best Sound)
- "AH, MIDDAY, YES..." (i.e. "Amadeus") (65A: Cry after remembering to meet at noon [1984]) (Best Sound)
- "SCHICK HOG, GO!" (i.e. "Chicago") (81A: "You there, hoarding the Quattro razor! Scram!" [2002]) (Best Sound)
- "GLAD HE ATE HER" (i.e. "Gladiator") (95A: How one cannibal felt after devouring the other [2000]) (Best Sound)
- "THUMB-MADE TRICKS" (i.e. "The Matrix") (110A: Some optical illusions created with one's fingers [1999]) (Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Sound)
The Academy Award for Best Sound is an Academy Award that recognizes the finest or most euphonic sound mixing, recording, sound design, and sound editing. The award used to go to the studio sound departments until a rule change in 1969 said it should be awarded to the specific technicians. The first were Murray Spivack and Jack Solomon for Hello, Dolly!. It is generally awarded to the production sound mixers, re-recording mixers, and supervising sound editors of the winning film. In the lists below, the winner of the award for each year is shown first, followed by the other nominees. Before the 93rd Academy Awards, Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing were separate categories. (wikipedia)
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I exaggerate about how few answers I liked. Looking it over, DARK HUMOR is a fine entry, as is ALIEN LIFE and HEAD ON IN. And some of the themers demonstrate real ... creativity, I guess you'd say. But I just can't pretend that getting them was fun. NODS OUT ... I'm still stuck on this. You NOD OFF, sure. But after you've been "dosed"? You might ... GO OUT ... CONK OUT ... PASS OUT ... but NODS OUT just clanks. And WALL-HUNG ... I guess technically, adjectivally, yes, art can be WALL-HUNG for sure. But ... "oh, did you see the Hopper exhibit? I really loved it, especially the WALL-HUNG stuff.""So ... all of it, then?""... Yes." In case you think it's just the punning that turned me sour on this one, here is the screenshot I took *just* after I started, well before I knew the theme, when I could tell that things were not headed in a good direction. The fill was weak and iffy right from the word "go" (which appears at least twice in this puzzle, btw, but it's just one two-letter word in a giant grid, so I don't really care). Anyway, that early screenshot:
By far the hardest part of the puzzle for me was the SOUND MIXING part, particularly the MIXING part and the adjacent fill. The DOADOET/NODSOUT/XOO pipeline really did me in. I could not recover any sense of pleasure after that. Every movie title was tough to get, obviously, because the "SOUND MIXING" was so, as I say, tortured. Some of the "mixes" kind of work ("GLAD HE ATE HER") and I guess a couple are actually so outlandish they're funny ("AH, MIDDAY ... YES ..."). But the bizarre compound adjective "THUMB-MADE" just about killed me, esp. after the bizarre compound adjective "WALL-HUNG." And the vowel sound in THEIR really sends "THEIR RITE'S TOUGH" wide of the mark. If forced to spell SCHICK (weird scenario...), I would've spelled it without that first "C," so that "SCHICK HOG, GO!" answer was a bit tough to come up with. I thought GRAN (with an "N") was a good [Nickname for mom's mom], which made THUMB-MADE TRICKS even harder to see (it was already the hardest-to-parse of the bunch). In the end, it wasn't just the "bad" puns—most puns are bad, and the only enjoyable ones (for me) are very bad—it's that they were so convoluted they (mostly) lost their snap, and then the revealer, instead of clarifying things, really muddied and gummed them up, both in terms of the clue wording and in terms of the actual factual accuracy of the clue. An ambitious idea, imperfectly realized.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. MANU = MAN. U. i.e. Manchester United (69A: English football powerhouse, to fans).
P.P.S. Really wanted 94A: Six-foot runners? (ANTS) to be EMUS