2010 Best Cinematography Oscar

The five nominees in the art and craft of film photography for this year's Oscars. Which film would get your vote?

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I think this one's between 'the big two' but I'm going for Avatar on this one.

This is the award Avatar should get.

I was flipping between Avatar and Hurt Locker, but went with Avatar. I think it will sweep everything except the big two (and editing)

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Suspect's Reviews

Dumb nomination for Avatar.

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Yeah, I haven't picked up a copy of American Cinematographer lately, but I'm surprised that Avatar wound up with a nomination. What percentage of its look is due to Mauro Fiore's photography and how much the numerous wizards on the FX team I can't say with any certainty, but obviously there isn't one scene on Pandora that he had much of anything to do with. But he's also one of the five nominees for the American Society of Cinematographers Award, so whatever it is his peers seem to feel he did something impressive. I just don't get it. This is Mauro's first Oscar nomination. Some of his other credits include Training Day, Smokin' Aces, Michael Bay's The Island and the upcoming big-screen A-Team.



Frenchman Bruno Delbonnel, nominated for the latest cinematic chapter in the Harry Potter franchise, has two previous noms for his work with Jean-Pierre Jeunet: Amélie and A Very Long Engagement (losing both). There are a few more practical locations in The Half-Blood Prince than Avatar, but I also can't quite seem to imagine an FX spectacular winning the Oscar...although Andrew Lesnie did win for The Fellowship of the Ring, over Bruno's Amélie as a matter of fact, so it's certainly not impossible.



Austrian DP Christian Berger is also enjoying his first Oscar nomination, for one of the Best Foreign Language nominees The White Ribbon. This is his fifth collaboration with Michael Haneke (including Caché and The Piano Teacher). It also marks the third black and white movie to earn an Oscar nomination in the past ten years, the others being Good Night, and Good Luck (Robert Elswit) and The Man Who Wasn't There (Roger Deakins). Janusz Kamiński for Schindler's List was the last time there was a win for black and white cinematography, and the only other nominees since the black and white and color Oscar categories were merged in 1967 are Raging Bull (Michael Chapman), Lenny (Bruce Surtees), The Last Picture Show (Robert Surtees), and In Cold Blood (Conrad Hall). Will The White Ribbon become the second winner since 1967? Probably not.



The Hurt Locker's Barry Ackroyd is a first-time Oscar nominee as well, having spent most of his career in his native England, working with filmmakers like Ken Loach and Paul Greengrass (his next movie to hit the screens will be Greengrass' Iraq piece The Green Zone). That The Hurt Locker has eight other noms including four of the "big eight" (Picture, Director, Actor and Original Screenplay) certainly helps his cause, and that he had zero green screen shots to process versus a zillion in Avatar may give him the slight edge here.



The fifty-four-year-old Robert Richardson is one of the reigning masters of cinematography. Inglourious Basterds is his sixth Oscar nomination, and he's already won twice for Scorsese's The Aviator and Stone's JFK. He also now has nine nominations at the American Society of Cinematographers Awards (though curiously hasn't won one there yet). It's the second time he's worked with Tarantino, previously having collaborated on Kill Bill. If Richardson does win this year, he'll join Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, Reds, The Last Emperor) as the only living three-time winner in this category. Conrad Hall, Robert Surtees, Winton Hoch, Arthur Charles Miller, and Freddie Young are all also three-time Oscar winners. Leon Shamroy won four Oscars for cinematography (Cleopatra, Leave Her to Heaven, Wilson and The Black Swan) and had another fourteen noms.


For me this is a tough call between Richardson and Ackroyd. The momentum of The Hurt Locker may be enough to carry him to the top, but I'm rooting for Robert and Inglourious Basterds. Though really, as long as Avatar doesn't win, I'll be happy...which means it'll probably win.

As for some snubs that I would have liked see make the cut rather than the FX-fests of Avatar and Half-Blood Prince, Roger Deakins did his usual magnificence for The Coen's A Serious Man, with (500) Days of Summer Eric Steelberg managed to make downtown L.A. look like a wonderland, Eduard Grau made the period L.A. of Tom Ford's debut A Single Man beautiful, Mira Nair's Amelia biopic was a bore but Stuart Dryburgh's photography was top-flight, Greig Fraser brought Jane Campion's requisite lushness alive for Bright Star, nobody saw it but Ryan Samul's work on The Missing Person was terrific especially for such a small film, I thought Ellen Kuras did a great job on Away We Go, Lawrence Sher made Vegas look as good in The Hangover as some of the movies it referenced like Rain Man and Casino, and while by design it's not quite as colorful as other recent Almodóvar pictures Rodrigo Prieto was perfection with Broken Embraces. And if you were going down the at least somewhat FX-enhanced path, Where the Wild Things Are blew me away visually, and Lance Acord should have been recognized by The Academy for it.

I completely agree, but it's why I went for Avatar over any of the others. I wouldn't have given it a nomination, but if it's going to be seen/accpeted as cinematography, then it's difficult to look past it for the Oscar, IMO.

I think the only chance Avatar has of winning this is if the Academy decides to award it with everything else. They give out some joke Oscars sometimes, but this one really would cause a stir, methinks.

Can't imagine why Avatar would even qualify.

I think Avatar is important because it may really bring the argument of what is "cinema" and what is "animation" to the forefront.

I personally do not consider Avatar serious "film". It is serious art in terms of visual fantasy art. Visual fantasy art has been around for ages, on the covers of sci-fi books and in comics. It is nothing new, but Avatar offers some nice examples. Avatar is more on par with Saturday morning entertainment for tots than serious film. So why give a photography award to a movie that is largely animated?

I want to make clear that I have limited behind the scenes info (footage) for Avatar.
I expect that many of the forest scenes (trees) and exoskeleton armor and whatnot are indeed models and shot live with a camera. How much of the film uses camera work is unknown to me. More info needed for fair judgement.

What was Avatar shot with, by the way? Anyone know? Imax camera? Those cameras insure but over $500,000 a piece. Hard to compete with that.

http://www.imax.com/images/corporate...X3DJan2002.pdf

http://www.imax.com/corporate/theatr...raAccessories/




How much of this film is IMAX 3D, how much is digital camera, how much is fabricated on the computer - all unknown to me. - Plus, the whole thing gets "reshot" on the computer when putting it together. "Frames" can now be completely altered in almost every way. (see post #12)

Avatar should receive 1 award. Visual FX. Seriously. The entire film is visual FX.

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I voted for The White Ribbon even though I don't really believe it will win. That was the high point of that mediocre and awful tale though. The entire film looked absolutely stunning.

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Numerous cameras were used, but I do not think any IMAX cameras were used. I know for a fact that they used eight cameras for most of the film, the Sony HDC-F950. HDC-1500 captured speed shots and an F23 for some shots. I'm not sure if they used more, but probably did.

Cameron specifically built his own camera to use 3-D technology. Meaning a few things, such as (much like the Red Camera) shoot a two shot of characters talking and then being able to (in the camera) go in for a close up, without the need of shooting that scene again and re-framing it as well as seeing the CG outcome of the mo-cap performances in real time.

I'm almost 100% sure everything was filmed with cameras. Even the final battle sequence. The only time they used CGI characters (non mo-cap) were some scenes when the general was in his exoskeleton armour.

It's well known that the film is 40% live action and 60% computer generated (Cameron's words) but I'm pretty sure he filmed those scenes that are CG.

Here is an interesting fact on the special effects:

" To render Avatar, Weta used a 10,000-square foot server farm making use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores.[97] The render farm occupies the 193rd to 197th spots in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Creating the Na'vi characters and the virtual world of Pandora required over a petabyte of digital storage,[98] and each minute of the final footage for Avatar occupies 17.28 gigabytes of storage"
-Jim Ericson (December 21, 2009). "Processing AVATAR". Information Management Newsletters.

uuffffff.

So, even though the scenery is added (CG overlay) you have so many photography elements going on that maybe it should get the award just for all the man hours involved.

You can film two people on a sound stage and then animate around them or even drop them into the animation, but is that cinematography?

I don't know. Take a picture and draw over it. Hmmmm.
I like some artists that do that. They take a picture and then blow it up poster size, then add paint. Looks cool. Isn't Avatar the same thing?

Sony Fusion 3D Camera System


I need to see these guys in action to know what they did.

Yeah, I get all that. I've seen enough of the behind-the-scenes footage to know that every single alien character was motion captured in a way that motion capture hasn't been done before, capturing even each actor's facial expressions and that they put them on top of things that stood in for the flying beasties and made them do their own fighting and jumping and all of that. Yeah, I get it.

But that is NOT cinematography. A cinematographer's job is not operating the camera, not most of the time. There are camera operators for that. The cinematographer's job is working with light, frame composition, etc. Because the camera movements are locked in I guess you can argue that there is some basic framing going on in-camera and on set, but lighting, depth of field, filters, lenses, location, focus, ALL of that is done at a much later stage by the FX department. I am truly stumped how other cinematographers have honored this flick with nominations. I truly do not understand.

This shot below, tell me what the cinematographer did to create it?



Not a fu*king thing, that's what. Background, 100% computer generated. Characters on the screen? Yes, there are real actors "underneath", but as far as what is on screen they are 100% computer generated. The lighting sources in this shot? 100% computer generated. The decision on how much detail would be seen in the background versus the foreground? Done by the FX department, 100% computer generated. If the focus does change, it is changed by the animators.

So even though when you say the words "James Cameron's Avatar" and the first zillion images that come to mind are the blue people, the planet of floating mountains and prehistoric-like creatures, etc.... did Avatar get its nomination for the shots of Giovanni Ribisi and Sigourney Weaver chatting inside? Don't think so.

You want to give Avatar every single FX award the Oscars have? Fine and dandy and they probably should. You want to give it special awards for the leaps in technology? Bully, huzzah, congrats. You want to call that cinematography? Horsehit.

I tend to agree with you and so it raises the question. What gives? Why has this film been nominated? It makes no sense to me.

And certainly there have been FX-spectaculars that have been nominated for and even won the Oscar for Best Cinematography. But back before the advent and perfection of CGI there was still plenty for the director of photography to do. Vilmos Zsigmond won for Close Encounters of the Third Kind at the 1978 ceremony, but for iconic shots like this...



...the cinematography is the effect. If this scene took place on Avatar's Pandora, 0% of its look would be due to the cinematographer.

Peter Pau won for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon back in 2001, but for scenes like this one...



...while wires and cranes and such were removed digitally, unlike Pandora's forest those are REAL trees, and Pau and director Ang Lee had to decide what time of day to shoot, what filters to use, how to move the camera, where to light from, etc. You know, like, CINEMATOGRAPHY. There are some heavy FX shots in the movie, but by in large the cinematographer actually had to earn his money.

The following year Andrew Lesnie won the Oscar for his work on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Now there are plenty of shots that the FX department is completely in charge of, and even in the shots of the actors some of them are constantly being resized and such digitally in post production, but as anyone who has ever been to New Zealand can attest or if you've seen any of the many, many hours of behind-the-scenes making-of footage, you know how much of Middle Earth was shot in practical location or on elaborate sets that were built. Every single one of those had to be lit and framed and decisions had to be made on where to put the camera, what lens to use, what speed to shoot in, and on and on. THAT is cinematography. Now as a bit of a purest, there is enough FX stuff in there that I probably wouldn't have voted for Lesnie.



And it's not that computers didn't aid fellow nominee Amélie, because clearly they did. Just because it takes place in Paris and not Middle Earth or Pandora doesn't mean that there isn't enhancement going on. But if you see the behind-the-scenes for Jeunet's movie, you can see what he and his cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel did with lighting and by painstakingly designing each shot before the cameras roll in comparison to every single scene set on Pandora.

Guillermo Navarro won the Oscar in 2007 for his cinematography in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. But even with its most famous scenes involving "The Fawn" or the other most striking visuals...



...they were brought to life by virtue of the work done by the director and director of photography. While there may be effects throughout, for the most part Navarro's job was essentially no different than what Chris Menges did for his Oscars in the 1980s for The Mission and The Killing Fields, no different as a process than what Nestor Almendros did for his Oscar for Days of Heaven in 1978, the same craft and art that James Wong Howe practiced in Hud back in 1963, and on and on and on. But every single shot on Avatar's Pandora, THAT is something so different and so COMPLETELY out of the hands of the D.P. I don't see how it can be considered cinematography.

And yet, here we are.

The scenes in Avatar may be spectacular, but they are spectacular special effects.

First of all, you don't need to 'school' me in what cinematography is, I've taken 3 years of that course and worked in the camera department long enough to know more about cinematography than what you've read.

Second of all, I wasn't defending it's nomination, I was stating facts about the film.

Again, saying that he had pretty much nothing to do with the look of the film feels like an insult to me. There is no way that he just let the animators do all the work. Food for thought, you realize that cinematographers have grips and gaffers to bend/move the light in film, right? What's the difference if he tells an animator to do it? I don't know, we'll see how it all pans out in the future of cinema.

I think the film was nominated more so for it's 3-D aspect, again my opinion. Out of the ones nominated, the one I find lacking is Harry Potter.

Don't be so touchy. I wasn't trying to school you specifically, but anybody and everybody who is trying to claim that Avatar is a feat of cinematography, including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the American Society of Cinematographers.



Really, that's the card you're going to play? So to you if he gave suggestions to the FX department, that makes it cinematography even if it's a fancy-ass cartoon? I don't even know that he did interact with them about such things, I would bet they operate independently of his department, ESPECIALLY for the scenes on Pandora that are being 100% created by them: why in the fart would the D.P. be looking over their shoulder? It's not like they're trying to match the Pandora footage he shot in Australia or Maui or someplace – he didn't shoot anything other than motion-capture on green screen soundstages. But for sake of argument, even if he was there nearly every single day over the years it took to animate the Pandora and Navi stuff...if the computers are generating all the content it doesn't matter if its Mauro Fiore or Jim Cameron or Terrence Malick or the ghost of Leonardo Da Vinci who are giving the instructions, the craft is being applied by the FX department....because they are FX shots. The grips, gaffers and focus pullers aide the cinematographer and camera operators to get their results, obviously. But you're saying a grip and a team of animators that are composing every single element that appears on screen for hundreds and hundreds of shots in Avatar are the same thing? 'Kay, well if that is what you're selling, I ain't buying. By that same logic, shouldn't Up and every PIXAR film be up for Best Cinematography? Or only if they have a certified A.S.C. cinematographer consult them, is that the new rule?

And now I am trying to school you specifically, because that's crazy talk.


Which isn't cinematography either. In my opinion.

As I said, give it every FX award there is, give it a bag of special Oscars for technical advances, but those things aren't cinematography or what Mauro Fiore and his team did on that movie.

Or we can just agree to disagree.


'Hmmmm, what should it look like outside these windows? Better go ask
the D.P., he'll know. After all, he was there....'


.

Great Achievements in Cinematography


LAWRENCE OF ARABIA


DAYS OF HEAVEN


THE LAST EMPEROR


AVATAR




'Well, let's see: three of these films showcase film photography
and one of them is a really sophisticated computer-animated
cartoon. Did you get it?'

I point out the words, Food For Thought. Meaning, let's think about it for a second. I never said that is what I believed, nor should he be given the Oscar for it, only that this could be the direction that a lot of films will be going. Is it traditional film cinematography? Of course not, could this be the future? It most certainly can.

Did he have a hand in with the animators? I don't know. Did he have a hand in the look of what Pandora looks like? Maybe, and apparently so do others. The film does have cinematography, you must admit this. Otherwise we are looking at a black screen.

If the wave of the future involves 3-D, cinematographers must adapt. Shooting for 3-D and shooting flat are different things.

Where do you draw the line? I don't know, but apparently the Academy draws it somewhere, and Avatar is on the accepting side. I'm sure professionals in that area might be better equipped to decide than some blokes on a message board.


And I know you were having some fun, but I wouldn't put Avatar in this list with the other films you have in the post above. It doesn't really help your argument either.