The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.
Best Cinematography
The nominees are:
Dune
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
The Tragedy of Macbeth
West Side Story
In researching this piece, I came across the name George J. Folsey. Folsey was the credited director of photography on 167 films across a span of seven decades, stretching from the silent era to the early 1970s. He was nominated for Best Cinematography 13 times from 1933 to 1963 and never won the award. This is a record for futility among cinematographers, at one time tied with modern legend Roger Deakins, who won Oscars on his 14th and 15th nominations.
I mention this only because I had written about Deakins a number of times during his record streak and cannot be certain that I ever seriously considered Folsey. His nominations came for such films as Meet Me in St. Louis and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and he also lensed the all-time sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet. Perhaps the only relevance here is that Bruno Delbonnel, nominated this year for The Tragedy of Macbeth, sits behind Folsey on the list with six nominations and no wins, third-most all time.
To me, it is one of the beautiful things about the Academy Awards that they can make us look at the history of the medium and appreciate work that has come before, work that had perhaps slipped from our collective memory. The masters of the form are all around us, and sometimes, it is good to take a minute to recognize them while they are still around.
The Tragedy of Macbeth - Delbonnel is one among those masters. He does not have the lengthy resum̩ of some of his peers, but what he lacks in volume he more than makes up for in quality and diversity. It seems as though there is always a new trick in the bag. Take his two most recent collaborations with Joel Coen Рthe western omnibus The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and this gothic expressionist take on The Tragedy of Macbeth. The two films could not look or feel more different, but both are magnificently rendered and tonally consistent while demonstrating the uniqueness of what makes Delbonnel special.
Larger than life shadows fall in every corner of this film, and Delbonnel uses the soundstages to tighten the noose around the central characters at every opportunity. Even the open landscapes are shot to look narrow and confining, suggesting Macbeth never had a choice, that his path is set. The walls close in further in every sequence of the film until the final scene, which literally takes place on a narrow bridge. There is no escape in the light and no hiding in the dark for these characters, and Delbonnel makes their fate palpable.
West Side Story - Janusz Kaminski feels like a constant at this point. A seven-time nominee and two-time winner, Steven Spielberg’s favorite director of photography has been part of some of the most important movies of the past three decades. His work has influenced the look of modern cinema beyond what is even conceivable, and despite that wide-ranging influence, there is nothing that looks like a movie directed by Spielberg and photographed by Kaminski.
A West Side Story clip recently went viral on Twitter for being such a bravura showcase of filmmaking that people could hardly believe it exists. As others pointed out, the viral clip, while amazing, is hardly the most impressive sequence in the film. That’s just the level Kaminski is working at, moving the camera in ways no one else can, adding flourishes where others would play it safe, and elevating the art of cinema when it would be simple enough just to play the hits.
Dune - The movement toward rewarding effects-laden films in this category really began in earnest in 1997 with Titanic, which was followed by wins for Saving Private Ryan, The Lord of the Rings, and Master and Commander. Then in 2009, James Cameron returned with Avatar to push the Oscars even further in that direction. Since then, we have gotten Inception, Hugo, Life of Pi, Gravity, and the other Denis Villeneuve epic, Blade Runner 2049.
All of which is to say, Dune is perfectly positioned to join the list of Cinematography winners whose photography is driven, at least in part, by special effects. This is not to discount the spectacular work two-time nominee Greig Fraser does in evoking the distinct worlds of Caladan and Arrakis, but rather to highlight a trend developing in the Academy. It takes a very specific skill set to craft magnificent images around green screens and computer effects, and voters are more ready than ever to recognize that.
Nightmare Alley - We talked a little last time about the two versions of Nightmare Alley currently in theaters: the color version and the black and white one, subtitled Vision in Darkness and Light. DP Dan Laustsen, previously nominated for his Guillermo Del Toro collaboration The Shape of Water, lensed the film in color originally. However, to mimic the look and feel of the classic noirs the film is homaging, it was lit in such a way that converting to black and white was possible. Somehow, it is equally gorgeous in both formats.
Whether in the brilliant pops of red sprinkled throughout an otherwise austere setting or in the subtle grays that take us from darkness into light, Laustsen illuminates the pain and betrayal at the heart of the story. Fascinatingly, for a film that is so much about characters who operate in the shadows, the photography is often bright and crisp, highlighting the way these villains accomplish their evil deeds in broad daylight, right under our noses.
The Power of the Dog - Cinematography is one of only two below-the-line awards that has been around since the first Oscars ceremony. That’s 94 years. For 30 of those years, the award was split between color and black-and-white photography, meaning there have been roughly 600 nomination slots in the category’s long history. Only two have gone to women and none before 2017, when Rachel Morrison broke through that particular glass ceiling with her nomination for Mudbound.
This year, Ari Wegner became the second woman to earn recognition in the field. Her dusty, sun-dappled work on The Power of the Dog brings Jane Campion’s western to life in ways that are both visceral and subconscious. It is not just the magnificent New Zealand vistas that stand out, though. The interior of the central family’s home, which is all shadows and angles, looms large over this world as a more menacing and immediate threat than anything the outside world could conjure.
The final analysis
It stands to reason that if The Power of the Dog is going to win Best Picture, it needs to win a few of the below the line categories. This is a place where it can win, and voters can make history by awarding the Oscar to a woman for the first time. That said, it was just last year that Nomadland won only Picture, Director, and Actress, falling short in all of the crafts categories but still triumphing at the top. I predicted Nomadland for Cinematography for the same reason I would predict The Power of the Dog, but major Slumdog Millionaire-style sweeps are fewer and farther between.
The Academy is not averse to spreading the love, in which case, Dune stands to benefit. If The Tragedy of Macbeth were better liked, it might stand a chance here, but that does not seem to be the case within the Academy. Kaminski is unlikely to win again for a film not near the top of the Best Picture race, and the nomination has to be considered the reward for Laustsen. So it comes down to Wegner or Fraser, and sometimes, bigger is better for voters. Go with Dune.
Will win: Dune
Should win: The Tragedy of Macbeth
Should have been here: The Green Knight
Next time: Best Production Design
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