SOUND MIXER KEVIN O’CONNELL HAS BEEN NOMINATED TWENTY TIMES—AND NEVER WON! THIS MIGHT BE THE YEAR HE FINALLY BREAKS…

THE SOUND BARRIER

This afternoon, I caught up with one of the nicest guys in the film industry, Kevin O’Connell, whose work on Transformers earned him his twentieth Academy Award nomination for Best Sound Mixing this year. What should be going through people’s minds when they think of Kevin is how impressive it is that anyone could accumulate that many nominations; what tends to, however, is that he has not yet won.

Prior to this year, Kevin was nominated for: Terms of Endearment (1983), Dune (1984), Silverado (1985), Top Gun (1986), Black Rain (1989), Days of Thunder (1990), A Few Good Men (1992), Crimson Tide (1995), The Rock (1996), Twister (1996), Con Air (1997), Armageddon (1998), The Mask of Zorro (1998), The Patriot (2000), Pearl Harbor (2001), Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), and Apocalypto (2006). His peers in the Academy’s sound branch, who determine the nominations, clearly have tremendous respect for his work. The entire Academy, however, gets to pick the winners, and the vast majority of them know very little about sound mixing. The same, for that matter, can be said of most of the rest of us, which is why I asked Kevin to explain exactly what a sound mixer does, as well as how he came to do it.

Kevin’s story, which you can listen to him share in the podcast below, is both remarkable and inspiring. It is the story of directionless man in his twenties whose mother wanted better for him, steered him into a sound mixing booth, and asked him only to, “Work hard, and then someday you go win yourself an Oscar, and you can stand up on that stage and you can thank me in front of the whole world.” It is the story of someone who has since spent 25 years in Hollywood, earned nearly as many Oscar nominations, and yet still manages to keep things in perspective—the kind of person who would agree to help out on a student film, and then stick with it even when it meant missing the chance to work on Dances with Wolves and finally win an Oscar. Most of all, it is the story of someone who understands that it truly is an honor just to be nominated, and that nobody who fails to win is a ‘loser.’

Last year, on the night of the Oscars ceremony, Kevin’s mother died in his arms. This year, he’ll will be back—Transformers is up against The Bourne Ultimatum, No Country for Old Men, Ratatouille, and 3:10 to Yuma for Best Sound Mixing—and he may yet get to thank her in front of the world…