Poor
Roger Deakins. He is one of the best at his art and has lasted long enough to become one of the true elder statesman in his business, but despite working with filmmakers like Joel & Ethan Coen, Martin Scorsese, and Denis Villeneuve, Mr. Deakins has not yet managed to win an Oscar for Best Cinematography.
Sicario marks his
thirteenth nomination! Unless he drops dead, he
will win one of these eventually. But not this year. Again.
With his long white hair,
Robert Richardson could be considered an elder statesman of cinematography, and boy is he still in his prime. Unlike Deakins, Richardson has won before. Three times, actually: Oliver Stone's
JFK and Scorsese's
The Aviator and
Hugo. He has five other nominations, including Tarantino's previous two flicks
Django Unchained and
Inglorious Basterds. Working in full 70mm must have been a joy worth every challenge it presented, but he has the bad luck of this work coming in the same year as that OTHER snowbound Western. His ninth nomination won't bring him his fourth win, but at only sixty years old he should have many, many more nominations and maybe even a couple more wins coming, especially if he keeps working with the likes of Tarantino and Scorsese.
I like
Ed Lachman a lot. Going back to the beginning of his career in the 1980s with films like David Byrne's
True Stories, Mira Nair's
Mississippi Masala, and Paul Schrader's
Light Sleeper, then teaming with Soderbergh for
The Limey (still my favorite from Lachman) and
Erin Brockovich before his first collaboration with Todd Haynes in
Far From Heaven. They subsequently paired for the Bob Dylan piece
I'm Not There and the HBO mini-series
"Mildred Pierce".
Carol is evocative of a pristine, dreamlike 1950s which is lovely and belies the nightmare of secrecy and intolerance the characters find themselves in (and less stylized than the colorful Douglas Sirk aping going on in
Far From Heaven). But he won't win. His only other nomination was for
Far From Heaven, the year Connie Hall won posthumously for
The Road to Perdition.
Australian
John Seale has been working since the 1980s as well, with his first two Oscar noms coming from Peter Weir's
Witness and Barry Levinson's
Rain Man, plus he also shot
Gorillas in the Mist, The Mosquito Coast, The Hitcher, Children of a Lesser God, Dead Poets Society, Steakout, and
The Firm in the first chunk of his career. He won the Oscar for
The English Patient, was nominated for
Cold Mountain, and helped establish the look for the whole series when he lensed
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. George Miller's return to Mad Max was something he couldn't say no to as he came out of retirement to help bring the ambitious actioner to life. If this is the capper to his career, wow, what an amazing way to go out (the Depp/Jolie dud
The Tourist was his previous credit, five years ago). If Emmanuel Lubezki wasn't the most amazing Director of Photography around right now, he may even have a chance of winning, but even as magnificent and striking as
Fury Road is, this is Lubezki's to lose.
Emmanuel Lubezki is simply lapping everybody else in the biz, right now. He has been one of the best cinematographers for the past twenty years, but he is emerging as perhaps
the cinematographer of this era.
The Revenant makes his eighth nomination, and he has won the award the past two years in a row, for
Gravity and
Birdman. And now he will become the first person to ever win three in a row for his amazing work in
The Revenant. Filming period pieces in natural light has been done before. A benchmark example is when John Alcott won the Oscar for 1975 for his stunning work in Kubrick's
Barry Lyndon, no small feat with the lenses and technology available at that time. Lubezki and Iñárritu certainly have more impressive toys to play with, but having the equipment and using it to its full glory are different steps.
If you haven't yet learned the name Emmanual Lubezki, you damn well should. If you see his name attached to a project know that you are going to be overwhelmed by some of the most beautiful images and ingenious camerawork in all of cinema.
.
Reply to Topic
