Countdown to the Oscars: Best Cinematography

We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.

Best Cinematography

The nominees are:

All Quiet on the Western Front

BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

Elvis

Empire of Light

TÁR 

Prior to looking it up, I would have bet money that the 1930 version of All Quiet on the Western Front, directed by Lewis Milestone, won Best Cinematography at the third ever Academy Awards. The film won Best Picture. Milestone won Best Director. But in fact, that was it. The adaptation was nominated for Best Writing, and Arthur Edeson was indeed nominated for Cinematography but lost. The work he lost to: Joseph T. Rucker and Willard Van der Veer for With Byrd at the South Pole.

This is fascinating because With Byrd at the South Pole is a documentary about American naval officer Richard E. Byrd’s journey to the South Pole. In the days before the documentary categories, it was the first documentary to win an award of any kind, and to this day, it remains the only documentary to win Best Cinematography. Edeson was nominated three times but never won, not even for his iconic work on a Best Picture winner you may have heard of: Casablanca.

I share this only because it is rare for a remake of a Best Picture winner to be so heavily involved in the Oscars race (West Side Story just last year notwithstanding) and because I personally find the history fascinating. This year’s nominees include two titans of the form, two relatively unknown quantities, and a woman with a real shot at making history. Let’s start with her.

Elvis – Last year, The Power of the Dog director of photography Ari Wegner became just the second woman ever nominated for Best Cinematography in the 94-year history of the Oscars. This year, Elvis lenser Mandy Walker became the third. Hopefully, this trend continues and the notoriously insular Cinematography Branch will find more laudable work in places it has rarely looked before. 

Walker previously worked with Baz Luhrmann on his downunder epic Australia, so she is familiar with frenetic pace and wandering eye of the director’s filmography. She is more than up to the task of matching Luhrmann’s energy and does everything in her power to craft a unique visual language to capture one of the most unique figures of modern American history.

All Quiet on the Western Front – One of the fun things about this process every year is discovering new and interesting artists in the world of film. I will be honest: I have never heard of cinematographer James Friend nor of any of the 10 other feature films he lensed before All Quiet on the Western Front. He did work on the relatively popular miniseries Patrick Melrose, but apart from that, his list of credits includes films called things like Truth or Dare (aka Truth or Die), Dead-cert (it’s about vampires apparently and is on Tubi), and Stalker (not the Tarkovsky one). 

All of this is to say, nothing could have prepared me for the starkly devastating work he delivers on Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front remake. It is brutal, troubling work that inserts the viewer right into the heart of darkness. The camera is relentless, charging right alongside the soldiers in every fruitless attempt to gain pointless yards of empty land. ‘Harrowing’ is overused as a descriptor for war photography, but there is truly no other word for it. Hopefully, we see Friend’s name on a lot more features to come.

TÁR – Roger Deakins has more Academy Award nominations in his career than TÁR lenser Florian Hoffmeister has feature film credits. No matter. Hoffmeister’s tightly controlled shots and precise compositions are proof that one need not have a long resumé to produce lasting work. Director Todd Field has often been compared to mentor Stanley Kubrick in the manner in which he composes shots, and TÁR is perhaps the best evidence yet of why those comparisons might be apt. Hoffmeister’s camerawork lends an epic grandeur to the story of Lydia Tár’s fall from grace, suggesting humor and horror in equal measure.

Empire of Light – Deakins’ and Mendes’ last collaboration was the universally acclaimed World War I, single-shot experiment 1917, which came within a hair’s breadth of winning Best Picture and earned Deakins his second Oscar. Safe to say, Empire of Light does not match that film for acclaim or accomplishment. In fact, probably a reasonable bet that this nomination, Deakins’ 16th, can be chalked up almost exclusively to the respect and admiration of the legend’s peers. The work is superb, as would be expected from a master craftsman, and there are some beautifully lit sequences within the interiors of the film’s main set, but on Deakins’ Hall of Fame resumé, this film barely warrants a footnote.

BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths – Speaking of legends of the craft, Darius Khodji has been making films with some of the biggest names in the business for more than 30 years. James Gray, David Fincher, Michael Haneke, Woody Allen, Bong Joon-ho, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and now Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Shockingly, this is just his second Academy Award nomination and first since Evita in 1996. It’s about damn time, and if its burden is to be the lone nomination for Iñárritu’s critically underappreciated film, so much the better.

Iñárritu’s last two films both won the Academy Award for Cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki both times for Birdman and The Revenant, respectively). Not wanting to beat around the bush, Khondji deserves to make it three in a row. The desert vistas, the interior shadows, the experimentation, the long takes, it’s all magnificent. It’s showy without being overwhelming and feels perfectly of a piece with the canvas on which Iñárritu is painting. The work is without equal in this category, and unfortunately, it is probably running in last place behind bigger names and more widely seen films.

The final analysis

Maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree with Elvis. It feels like the kind of movie older Academy voters would enjoy. All the effort is up there on the screen. Elvis Presley is an icon. The performances are great. It’s a big, showy biopic of the sort the Oscars used to reward all the time. So in looking for a movie that is likely to sweep all the crafts awards, I saw Elvis and felt it seemed right. But, All Quiet on the Western Front is right there.

The war film won seven BAFTAs from 14 nominations, a record for a non-English language film. Among those, it was awarded for its cinematography. War films in general have a long history of winning this award, going back to A Farewell to Arms in 1933 and up to 1917 just three years ago. Only three times in the past 50 years has Cinematography gone to a film not in English, the last being Pan’s Labyrinth back in 2006, but the language barrier seems to be breaking down across the membership. Maybe that helps All Quiet.

But, I just cannot get past the nagging feeling that when Everything Everywhere All at Once is not available for the younger voters, the older voters will show out for Elvis. I don’t think it is the best work this year, but if Mandy Walker becomes the first woman in the 95-year history of the Academy Awards to win Best Cinematography, I will stand up, applaud, and say, ‘Hell, yeah. Good for her.’

Will win: Elvis

Should win: BARDO

Should have been here: Athena

A note about my favorite snub: In another universe, Romain Gavras’ Athena would have been a crafts juggernaut throughout awards season. It is one of the most impressively mounted films I have ever seen, and that all begins with Gavras and cinematographer Matias Boucard taking you on a descent into hell with one of the wildest, most jaw-dropping single-take opening sequences you will ever see. The accomplishment here is inconceivable and should be witnessed by as many people as possible.

Next time: Production Design