Talk about the Academy Awards, which will be broadcast on Sunday, always revolves around the major categories: Best Picture, Best Actor and Actress, Best Director, etc. That's because acting and even directing are easy for the average moviegoer to understand and form an opinion on. A couple of the more technical categories, like visual effects  and costume design are more obscure but still simple to grasp. (And how does the ring of "three time Oscar-nominee Transformers" strike you?) But what exactly is editing? If you're just assembling all the shots and forming them into a coherent movie, isn't that just part of directing? Well, no. (Unless you're "Roderick Jaynes," which is just an editing pseudonym inexplicably used by the Coen brothers.) Even knowing that, I have never walked out of a theatre and said, "Damn, that was some sharp editing." Today Slate posted an interesting video of film editor Mark Helfrich attempting to explain what makes the movies nominated for Best Editing worthy of the award:

I love how at the very end Helfrich says that instead of giving the award to editors who work with great directors, they Academy should laud editors who managed to wring something watchable out of a shitty film. His remark may be self-serving: Helfrich is a frequent collaborator with noted hack Brett Ratner, and his resume is filled with cinematic catastrophes like Rush Hour 2, Rush Hour 3, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Showgirls. But in essence, he's right. In fact, after watching the excellent documentary Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy, I'm convinced that the lion's share of credit for the original Star Wars goes not to George Lucas, but editors Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew. They're the ones who kept scenes like this (and there were apparently tons more just as awful that Lucas filmed) from ruining one of the great movies of all time: