Who Will Win the Oscar for Best Cinematography?
Roger Deakins has 13 nominations without a single win
In case you’ve been living under a rock, the 88th Academy Awards Ceremony is happening on Sunday. As a film nut and a photographer, I find one of the most interesting categories is Best Cinematography. There have been some beautiful films produced this year, and all of the contenders deserve a nomination, but Best Cinematographer isn’t always an indicator of Best Picture. Only two films are nominated in both categories this year (Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant), and only four of the past ten Best Cinematography winners won Best Picture. However, this year the favourite in this category is the film that is expected to sweep the board — The Revenant.
The Revenant is a stunning film, shot using only natural light and dominated by Alejandro Iñárritu’s signature long takes. I was awed by its massive, frozen landscapes when I went to see it, and was pulled back to the cinema for a second viewing mainly on the strength of its visuals.
However, there’s a potential banana skin here — Emmanuel Lubezki. The Revenant’s acclaimed cinematographer has taken home this award two years running (for Gravity in 2014 and Birdman in 2015). This may seem like a distinct advantage, but no one has ever won the Best Cinematography award three times in a row. In fact, only two major Oscar categories have been won three consecutive years in a row, Best Visual Effects for The Lord of the Rings franchise and Best Score, won by Roger Edens in 1948, 1949 and 1950. It will be an unprecedented success if Lubezki pulls out a win on Sunday.
Sitting in the auditorium with him will be fellow nominee, Roger Deakins. Anyone who know anything about cinematography will recognise his name. Deakins has worked on almost every Coen Brothers film over the past 15 years, as well as with other huge names such as Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and Sam Mendes. Poor Roger Deakins has been nominated an incredible thirteen times without a win. If DiCaprio is overdue for an Oscar, Deakins surely is too. His work on Sicario was outstanding, and I believe that he may actually take home the award this year.
The other big contender in this category is Mad Max: Fury Road, surely the most visually exhilarating film of the year. The sweeping desert expanses and oil-drenched world evoked by George Miller was greatly enhanced by John Seale, his cinematographer. Seale came out of retirement to help out Miller with the production, and has one previous win under his belt, back in 1996 for The English Patient. He will be hopeful of another, and the fact that Mad Max has been able to break into the typically mainstream Academy nominations is interesting, to say the least. Mad Max: Fury Road has been nominated in a staggering ten categories, and although it’s hard to envision it taking home the prize for Best Picture, it could take home Best Cinematography if the bigger categories go elsewhere.
The other two contenders are The Hateful Eight and Carol, with nominations for Robert Richardson and Ed Lachman, respectively. Tarantino’s latest film hasn’t garnered the critical acclaim we’ve tended to see for his movies in recent years, and although the film broke with conventional filming techniques and received the widest release on 70mm film since 1992, it seems unlikely that it’ll win here. Richardson does have form, however. He has won the award three times in his career, and will tie for the most wins ever if he takes home a statuette this Sunday.
Lachman picked up his second nomination in this category for Carol, and although a win is always a possibility, it does seem like a stretch. The film has little in the way of so-called ‘Oscar buzz’ leading into the awards, particularly compared to the frontrunners, but Carol is a beautifully-shot film nonetheless.
If I were to predict a winner, my money would be on The Revenant, but I’d love to see a few statues being awarded to George Miller, John Seale and the Mad Max: Fury Road team. Having said that, there are always shock wins, and perhaps we could see one in this category this weekend.
