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| Director of photography Roger Deakins earned his 13th nomination for Best Cinematography for Sicario. |
Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the
Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check
back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.
Best Cinematography
The nominees are:
Sicario
As I said last year, this is my favorite category, and
everything I said then holds true now. I would also add cinematography might be
the most democratic craft where general audiences are concerned. The average
movie-goer does not necessarily know what makes for a good sound mix or whether
something is well edited, but anybody can look at an image onscreen and
understand its beauty. Photography is visceral. We respond to it because we
feel it instinctively.
That said, it is among the most technically challenging
aspects of filmmaking. Composition, depth of field, color, the interplay
between light and shadow – these are intellectual, artistic pursuits. Only the
masters can make it seem as easy as pointing a camera and rolling film. The
audience feels the image because of the care and effort that went into creating
it. Few use greater care or put forth more effort than these five nominees.
The Revenant – The images Emmanuel Lubezki captures boggle the
mind. The ways his camera moves through space, frames action, and observes
stillness are on a level we have never seen. I would call him the best
cinematographer alive today if not for the fact I think he has a legitimate
claim as the best of all time. A quick greatest hits from the man they call
Chivo: Sleepy Hollow, The New World, Children of Men, The Tree of
Life, Gravity, Birdman, and now The Revenant. Every frame from every one of those films could hang
in a museum.
Perhaps it sounds like I am overstating his brilliance, but
I promise the modern history of cinema will not be written without mentioning
Lubezki. His work has always been otherworldly, but his two collaborations with
director Alejandro González Iñárritu, Birdman
and The Revenant, have changed the
way we think about the art form. The
Revenant is composed of a series of gorgeous gray and white tableaux that
evoke the primal forces of nature in their grandeur and objectivity. Lubezki
has no rival, and The Revenant has no
equal this year in cinematography.
Lubezki has been nominated nine times and won twice – of
course, he should have won at least twice more. His two wins have come in the
last two years for Gravity and Birdman, making him only the fourth person
in history to win consecutive cinematography Oscars. No one has done it three
times, but this work and this artist might just break that streak. The only
person standing in the way is the next nominee on our list.
Mad Max: Fury Road – John Seale retired a few years ago with a
résumé that included four Oscar nominations and one win for The English Patient, as well as
countless other popular and critical hits. His legacy was secure, and he could
have left it at that. Instead, he let George Miller talk him back to work for
the gonzo action epic Mad Max: Fury Road.
Thank god he did because the 73-year-old director of photography brings to the
film the energy and nihilism of someone 50 years younger but the skill of a
craftsman who has been in this game forever.
When you watch Mad
Max: Fury Road, the first thing you notice is the color. The
hyper-saturated vistas of Miller’s post-apocalyptic wasteland are absolutely
striking. Never has a desert been so orange, and at night, you never saw the
earth so blue. It is audacious and bold and innovative in ways lesser
filmmakers would shy away from, but Miller provides the canvas, and Seale
paints the picture. Whether Seale will win the Oscar this year is an open
question, but our victory as an audience is simply that he came back for one
last ride – and on a war rig, no less.
Carol – Ed Lachman may not be the star the rest of the nominees
in this category are this year, but his chameleon-like adaptability behind the
camera has made him the perfect fit for genre-hopping director Todd Haynes. Every
time they come back together, Lachman seems inspired to push his work in new,
exciting directions. Beginning with the Sirkian melodrama Far From Heaven and onto the Bob Dylan biopic as experimental art
film I’m Not There and cable
miniseries Mildred Pierce, Lachman
always seems to find new notes to play for Haynes.
So it is with their latest collaboration, Carol, a 1950s-set romance that is
thematically similar to their previous work but as stylistically different as
can be. Since the story is set primarily in New York City, Lachman has license
to go darker and dirtier than one typically would expect for the era being
depicted. This world feels lived in, and Lachman constantly obscures the frame
with rain or curtains or windows or all three to suggest the hidden lives of
the characters, the lives nobody sees or wants to see.
Sicario – Twelve previous nominations for Roger Deakins and no
wins. This is his 13th nod, and he will not win this one either, putting him in
a tie with the late George Folsey for Oscar futility in this category. To nominate
him that many times, his fellow cinematographers must respect him beyond
belief, and that respect is due, but the Academy as a whole simply has never
been willing to go there. For actors and directors who get repeated nominations
without winning, there is often a groundswell of support as members rally
behind the artist and finally award him or her. That does not seem to be true
for craftspeople such as Deakins.
The work itself this year, well, of course it is awesome.
This is the fourth consecutive year Deakins has received a nomination, and Sicario is the best work he has done of
the bunch. The night-vision sequence alone is enough to leave even accomplished
filmmakers scratching their heads and wondering how it was done. Deakins uses
shadows and silhouette the way musicians use silence, finding meaning in the
emptiness. It is truly fine work and Deakins’ best probably since the one-two
punch of The Assassination of Jesse James
by the Coward Robert Ford and No
Country for Old Men in 2007, but it still is only the third- or fourth-best
nominated work this year.
The Hateful Eight – Like Lubezki and Deakins, Robert Richardson
is a giant of cinematography. His work with Oliver Stone (10 films, three
nominations, one Oscar) and Martin Scorsese (four films, two nominations, two
Oscars) would be enough to secure his place in the canon. Yet, his
collaborations with Quentin Tarantino are likely the films for which he will be
most remembered – five films, three nominations, no Oscar yet.
Richardson has proved to be the ideal director of
photography to capture Tarantino’s twin loves of American westerns and martial
arts films. If you ask me, Kill Bill
Vols. 1 and 2 constitute a crowning achievement in paying homage to a genre
while establishing a unique voice outside the genre’s confines. Go figure,
those are the only two films together for which Richardson was not nominated.
The Hateful Eight
is a grand experiment in bringing a long-dormant film process back to life,
glorious Ultra Panavision 70, as it was billed. It lives up to that billing in
the movie’s opening sequences, set amid a blizzard in the mountains of Wyoming.
However, when the film moves indoors for the last two hours and 20 minutes or
so of its three-hour runtime, the wider frame loses some of its punch. The
nomination is a nice bit of recognition from fellow cinematographers, but I
doubt if the work will do much for the rest of the Academy when put up against
this list of nominees.
The final analysis
Mad Max: Fury Road
or The Revenant, flip a coin. The
Academy likes its winners to be pretty, innovative, or both. That sounds more
like The Revenant, but I have this
nagging feeling that voters will be reluctant to award Lubezki for a third
straight year. The work certainly deserves it, but with a viable alternative
and a great story in Seale, it is just as possible members go that direction.
Carol and Lachman
would be the likely beneficiary of a split vote between the top two films, and
Lachman received the lion’s share of critical plaudits this season, though most
of those awards came before The Revenant
had screened. In the end, I am predicting Lubezki will pick up his third in a
row because it is the film more Academy members are likely to have watched, and
to watch it is to be in awe of it.
Will win: The
Revenant
Should win: The
Revenant
Should be here:
The Tribe
Tomorrow: Best Editing
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