Excerpt from Cincinnati.com
Cincinnatians, do you need someone to root for to win an Oscar on Sunday? Look no further than Ohio native Hannah Beachler, who appears to be a favorite to win an Academy Award for set design for her work on "Black Panther" and its fictitious country, Wakanda.
She's facing competition from the likes of "Roma," "Mary Poppins Returns" and "First Man." Hmm, Wakanda? Nineteenth-Century London? Space and moonscapes?
My money's on Wakanda. Have you seen it? It's been my computer screen's background for a year.
Last year I wrote a column about the positive impact of "Panther" for the way it depicted African peoples and cultures. Little did I know then that the person who dreamed up Wakanda, with its amazing technology, sweeping landscapes, and breathtaking design, was a homegirl.
Beachler, 48, grew up in the Dayton suburb of Centerville. She studied fashion design at the University of Cincinnati but earned a bachelor's degree in motion pictures from Wright State University in 2005.
No fewer than 10 media organizations have featured Beachler's story in the run-up to the Oscars (8 p.m. EST Sunday on ABC).
If comic book flicks are not your thing, you'd probably like "Panther" anyway. If you dig cool architecture and design, this movie is for you. Beachler told National Public Radio she spent months in Africa to research everything from topography, to fauna, to the curves and metallic look of T'Challa's spaceship.
"The rocks, the moss on the rocks, how the rocks were formed, how they were layered, the color of them — everything around me that was nature I took pictures of," Beachler said.
Beachler said she was inspired by the late Zaha Hadid, who designed Cincinnati's Contemporary Art Center. She was best known for her neo-futuristic designs.
To audition for the job, Beachler spent $12,000 of her own money to envision what Wakanda would look like. That included creating a more than 400-page "bible" that imagines the history of Wakanda, which has snow-covered mountains, green valleys, arid lands and tropical forests. She uses birchwood to the throne room for the mountain king M’Baku’ for example. That's because birch grows in the north where it's cold, so she figured it would grow in the mountains, Beachler told Fast Company's Mark Wilson.
She's no neophyte when it comes to production design. In 2016, she was in Cincinnati for about a month as the set designer for "Miles Ahead," the Miles Davis biopic directed by Don Cheadle. Hollywood knows by now that Cincinnati is a great stand-in for 1950s New York. It didn't hurt that the Oscar-nominated "Carol," also set in the 1950s New York, had filmed in Cincinnati.
She improvised to re-create Davis' New York home.
She told Variety Magazine that her team gutted an abandoned Cincinnati church to recreate Davis' New York home. She also was set designer for "Creed" and "Moonlight," which won three Academy Awards in 2017.
We don't want to jinx Beachler's chances, to be sure, but based on all the publicity she has received, more than just the folks back home believe she can win.
Ohio and Cincinnati, you've got someone to root for in Oscars race. She's not in front of the camera. But with her imagination and execution, she has given us Wakanda forever.
