Countdown to the Oscars: Best Cinematography

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:

Carol

The Hateful Eight

Max Max: Fury Road

The Revenant

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

Film festivals, Coen brothers, and Scorsese talks

The 15th anniversary screening of O Brother, Where Art Thou? at the New York Film Festival (photo credit: Sean DiSerio).

With the end of the New York Film Festival today, fall festival season is mostly at a close. The big ones – Telluride, Toronto, Venice, New York – have had their say and launched a great majority of the films that will compete for the top Oscars come January and February. For the most part, the movies that were meant to play like gangbusters did, and a little below, we will take a look at some of the reactions as the first phase of the run-up to the Academy Awards wraps up.

I have lived in New York nearly two years now, but this was the first year I was able to attend any of the New York Film Festival. As you might imagine, it was quite the experience, one I hope to expand on in the coming years. No, I did not get to attend any of the big premieres or see any of the new films. I will catch up with those in theaters like most of you will. Instead, my 2015 New York Film Festival experience was focused on the past.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

On Sept. 29, I was invited to the 15th anniversary screening of Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the brothers’ adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey transposed to Dust Bowl America. In attendance for the post-screening question-and-answer session, moderated by festival director Kent Jones, were the Coens, stars George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson, and legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins.

Tim Blake Nelson, Geroge Clooney, and John Turturro in O Brother.

The Coens are as rye as their films suggest, and at any mention of their genius – which came up a lot from the audience – they demurred. As far as they are concerned, they are just two humble guys who like to make movies. In their introduction, Joel Coen said they rarely re-watch their films, and the last time they had was at a similar event for their debut feature, Blood Simple. He joked they came away with 15 or 20 minutes of edits to make and added the next time we see O Brother not to be surprised if it is about 15 minutes shorter.

For the most part, they seemed reluctant to discuss any deeper meaning or intent behind their film – a trait that can be seen in almost all their interviews, as well – but that did not stop the rest of those assembled on stage from gushing about their work. Nelson in particular was complimentary and also offered that the Coens and this film essentially launched his career.

Deakins, who was Oscar-nominated for the film and has worked with the Coen brothers 12 times, spoke about the digital intermediate process used to capture the faded-postcard look of the film. The technique involves digitizing a film to alter the color and other characteristics of the image in post-production. It was the first time the process had been used in a major motion picture in the U.S., and its success is further proof of Deakins’ brilliance behind the camera.

Ethan Coen, Kent Jones, and Nelson at the afterparty.

Clooney, whose third collaboration with the Coens you may have seen a new trailer for this week, is every bit the star you imagine him to be, and his reputation as a charming, impish troublemaker seems well deserved if you believe Clooney himself. He told tales of playing the Coens off each other, trying to trip up the famously simpatico siblings, and just generally being a puckish presence on set. He was similarly puckish on stage, much to the audience’s delight.

The evening concluded with an afterparty at the Landmarc restaurant in Columbus Circle and drinks with the Coens, Deakins, Nelson, and a number of festival luminaries. Clooney did not attend the afterparty, which is probably for the best. Stars like that have a tendency to suck all the air out of a room just by showing up. As it was, it was a loose affair full of good conversation, tasty food, and free-flowing wine.

I told Deakins what he must already know – that he is a master of what he does and his work on this year’s Sicario is breathtaking. I listened to Nelson, Jones, and Ethan Coen chat it up on one side of the room as Joel Coen held court on the other. At the end of it all, I stood on the sidewalk and joked with Ethan Coen about the rain, which had started sometime during the party. He chuckled, but the joke was clearly on me as he made his way to the car he arrived in, while I, dressed for the occasion but not the weather, walked to my train.

Heaven Can Wait

If you are a film nerd – and if you are here, you are either a film nerd or related to me somehow – there is no more rewarding experience than listening to Martin Scorsese speak. Hearing Scorsese talk about film and film history is like hearing Hank Aaron talk about baseball or Ernest Hemingway about writing. There is nothing you can say that will add to the conversation, so just shut up, sit back, and listen.

Martin Scorsese talks to Jones (photo credit: David Godlis).

For about 25 minutes Oct. 1 at Alice Tully Hall, I had the chance to do just that. Scorsese was at the Lincoln Center for a screening of Ernst Lubitsch’s classic Heaven Can Wait (no relation to the 1978 Warren Beatty movie of the same name), but mostly, he was in town to talk about The Film Foundation and its ongoing mission to rescue and preserve classic films for future generations.

Heaven Can Wait is a beautiful showcase for the foundation’s work. For a movie from 1943, the print we saw looked absolutely gorgeous, featuring a depth of color and brilliance of sound we would be lucky to get for a new film, let alone one produced more than seven decades ago. The set design truly pops, and Gene Tierney is as luminous as you are ever likely to see her. If you have the opportunity to see a roadshow screening at a theater or museum of one of The Film Foundation’s restored prints, I urge you to go. Whether or not you have seen the films, these restored prints are like seeing them anew.

Jones was back, ostensibly to moderate the conversation, but in the end, he was just like the rest of us in the audience, an engaged student humbly taking in lessons from the master. Jones opened the talk by asking Scorsese to describe how he got involved in the preservation and restoration of old films, and that was it. Scorsese was off.

It would be an injustice to the experience to pull out of context a few choice quotes or funny anecdotes. It was not that kind of evening. When you listen to Scorsese lecture, it is about feeling the cumulative effect of one man’s life in film washing over you. If you are lucky, you will grasp just some of it. This man, a giant of the film industry, has dedicated most of the second half of his life so far to giving back to that industry. He is an inspiration, through and through, and just given the chance to sit in awe of him, well, yeah, heaven can wait.

Festival season

The fall festival season is an embarrassment of riches for film fans. It is the time when movies we have all been anticipating get their first public screenings, and when movies we have never even heard of prove worthy of anticipation. Moreover, the festival circuit is now the prime breeding ground for Best Picture contenders at the Oscars and, more often than not, Best Picture winners.

Going back to the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, each of the last eight Best Picture winners has debuted at a festival, and just to prove everything is connected in some way or another, the last film to win without a festival premiere was Scorsese’s The Departed in 2006. Unsurprisingly, that was also the last Best Picture winner that was a significantly commercial proposition from the get-go, although The King’s Speech, Slumdog Millionaire, and Argo were all box-office hits.

However, over the last few years, an interesting shift has taken place with regard to the line between independent, festival hit and big-budget blockbuster – namely, it has disappeared. In fact, some of the best reviewed films of this festival season have been commercially minded movies from marquee directors such as Ridley Scott (The Martian), Steven Spielberg (Bridge of Spies), Robert Zemeckis (The Walk), and Danny Boyle (Steve Jobs). There is no saying exactly whether these films will have the legs to make it to Oscar season, but with those names, those reviews, and likely big numbers at the box office, they have a good shot.

Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa is scheduled for a December release.

As far as the movies I was less familiar with coming into the fall, a few have certainly cropped up that I will be putting at the top of my personal must-see list. Foremost among them, writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa, a stop-motion animated feature that won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival. I am a big fan of Kaufman’s writing (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and an even bigger fan of his lone feature directing credit, Synecdoche, N.Y., so consider me in the bag for his latest venture.

Another director I have always loved is Tom McCarthy, whose first three features are unimpeachable – The Station Agent, The Visitor, and Win Win. He took an odd turn off course with last year’s simultaneously dour and oddly whimsical The Cobbler, but he appears to be back in form with Spotlight, which has gotten some of the best notices of any film at any festival this year. The film tracks the true story of the Boston Globe’s attempts to break open the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. It sounds like topical, important work from one of our finest, most underappreciated directors, and I cannot wait.

I could go on, but you get the idea. The festival season is over, which means it is movie-going season for the rest of us. It is nearly impossible in any year to keep up with all the great films being released, and this year looks better than most, so as my idol used to say, I’ll see you at the movies.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Cinematography

Timothy Spall stars as JMW turner in the gorgeous Best Cinematography nominee Mr. Turner.

Each day as we make our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

Best Cinematography

The nominees are:

Birdman

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Ida

Mr. Turner

Unbroken

This is my favorite category. What distinguishes film as a storytelling medium from others such as radio or literature or even television in many cases is its ability to tell stories visually. We take it for granted. With Facebook and Instagram, we are all essentially telling our life stories through images, but if you stop for a second and really think about it, it should become clear what a revolutionary idea that is.

Nothing connects the world like moving images. We cannot all read the same books or listen to the same speeches, but we all understand that shadows are scary, chases are thrilling, and pratfalls are funny. All it takes is the right image, and a filmmaker can speak to the whole world. The cinematographers are the artists who craft those images, and the best of their work serves as a masterclass in why films are important.

This year’s nominees run the gamut from war stories to chamber dramas, color to black and white, and statue still to ever-moving. What they share, however, is impeccable craftsmanship and a dedication to visual storytelling. Only one nominee this year is a previous winner, and he is the most likely and deserving winner as well, so that is where we will begin our analysis.

Birdman – There is not another film this year that blends the innovation and integration of director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki’s work on this picture. A lot has been written about the work, and I have written about it a number of times, but to see it is to know you are witnessing greatness. The basic trick of the film is that it looks like one unbroken take. The camera darts and dives, swoops and spins, but never looks away. Save for couple moments at the beginning and end, the film’s few edits are hidden within the structure of the camerawork.

The style is the logical result of the direction Lubezki has been heading his entire career, particularly in his collaborations with director Alfonso Cuarón, who is good friends with Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Cuarón has always favored long takes, and Lubezki has proven his aptitude with such shooting conditions time and again. He won the Oscar for his work last year on Cuarón’s Gravity and should probably have another two for his lensing of Cuarón’s Children of Men and Terrence Malick’s gorgeous The Tree of Life. No matter. He will most likely win his second award in a row this year.

Except for a short segment in the omnibus film To Each His Own Cinema, this is Lubezki’s first collaboration with Iñárritu, but the two are already hard at work shooting another film together – The Revenant, starring Leonardo Dicaprio, which is due out at the end of this year. If the results of Birdman are any indication, we should all be very excited about the next collaboration from these two unique artists.

Mr. Turner – If it were not for the brilliant, boundary-pushing work of Lubezki, cinematographer Dick Pope’s painterly lensing of Mike Leigh’s JMW Turner biopic would be this year’s hands-down winner. It is just as deserving, and in many ways, it is the more classical nominee, a throwback to the old style of shooting a film. While Lubezki’s camera flies in and out of scenes like it is on a mission, Pope carefully crafts each moment, each frame for maximum impact.

The film is about a painter who is famous for his impressionist landscapes, and Pope steps up to the challenge of matching the story of England’s greatest artist with some of the most beautiful compositions you are ever likely to see. While several sequences are set up to recreate the look and feel of a Turner painting in real life, the work in between these bravura scenes is just as stark and just as rewarding.

If you are a voter, you could flip a coin to choose between these two pictures and come up with a deserving winner every time. The best part of both pieces is how the cinematography is integrated into the storytelling. These are not self-conscious gimmicks. Lubezki’s unbroken take is indicative of the maelstrom of activity constantly swirling around the characters in Birdman, while Pope’s picture-perfect frames are a window into the world as an artist might see it. When it comes to picking a winner, you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

Ida – One of the best things about the cinematographers’ branch is that its members are willing to look outside the box for nominees. From Poland, Ida is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film this year, in addition to this cinematography nod. It is highly deserving of the recognition in both cases. Shot in black and white by the team of Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski, Ida tells the story of a Catholic nun who spends a few nights with a less-than-virtuous aunt before taking her final vows.

Similar to Pope’s work on Mr. Turner, Zal and Lenczewski let the framing do the work for them, and some of their choices are so brilliant as to boggle the mind. These are two characters trapped by circumstance and convention, and in nearly every scene, Zal and Lenczewski place objects in the frame to trap them further. From car trunks to lamp posts to electrical wires, these two women are constantly placed in boxes inside boxes, a stunning evocation of the characters’ mindsets and their place within the context of society as a whole.

The Grand Budapest Hotel – Robert Yeoman is probably the least assuming of the nominees this year, having shot mostly either independent or studio comedies throughout his career. He has been the director of photography on every one of director Wes Anderson’s live-action films, which makes a certain amount of sense. Anderson has such a unique and specific visual style that his films could almost only be shot by one person, someone who understands exactly what the director is going for.

As in each of their previous collaborations, Yeoman does a great job of balancing Anderson’s usual hyperactivity with an unfailing precision of movement and framing. Yeoman and Anderson favor symmetrical setups and proscenium staging, allowing for the maximum amount of action to take place within the dollhouse like structure of a film in which characters move in packs from room to room and set to set.

My only real problem with this nomination is how much the work feels of a piece with what Yeoman and Anderson have done before. They are not stretching their visual style so much as fine tuning it, but perhaps that is okay when the style itself is so striking. As I have mentioned, The Grand Budapest Hotel is the first of Anderson’s films to catch on with the Academy in a big way, and that success has swept up a lot of Anderson’s below-the-line collaborators, Yeoman among them.

Unbroken – Roger Deakins is a god among cinematographers and rightly so. His work with the Coen brothers alone is enough to place him in the pantheon of the greatest of all time (Fargo, No Country for Old Men, True Grit, The Man Who Wasn’t There, etc.), not to mention his incomparable work on films such as The Shawshank Redemption, Skyfall, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. A living legend, this is his 12th nomination in this category. He has never won, and this will not be the year that streak ends.

As good as Deakins is, Unbroken stands as the least impressive among these nominees, primarily because it falls into the trap of so many recent war films – desaturated colors, poorly integrated effects, and an overreliance on grand vistas that mean little in context. Deakins never gives less than 100 percent, and he has been highly deserving of all his previous nominations, but this seems like one case in which name recognition alone was enough to get him onto the shortlist.

The final analysis

As I said, you cannot go wrong with either Birdman or Mr. Turner, but now that Lubezki already has the gold seal of approval from the Academy, there seems to be little in the way of a repeat win in this category.

Will win: Birdman

Should win: Birdman

Wish it had been here: Goodbye to Language