Oscar Volley: Best Cinematography could make History

Team Experience is discussing the various Oscar categories. Here's Cláudio Alves, Nick Davis, Ben Miller, and Eurocheese discussing the Best Cinematography race.

CLÁUDIO ALVES: From an aged future that looks like the ancient past to a black-and-white nightmare of Expressionistic Shakespeare, from digital polish to a rainbow of 35mm lens flares, the Best Cinematography Oscar race presents a cornucopia of varied visual strategies. However, to celebrate this category for variety feels somewhat disingenuous this year. For the first time since the color and black-and-white categories merged in 1967, the Cinematography ballot looks identical to the Production Design one. Even though voted on by separate branches, these lineups' sameness speaks to a broader problem – how the Academy feels increasingly resistant to expand its interest beyond a select group of pictures each season…

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Oscar Volley: Best Cinematography, Half-Locked, Half-Not?

Continuing our Oscar Volley series at The Film Experience. Eric Blume, Elisa Giudici, and Glenn Dunks talk Best Cinematography. 

Greig Fraser shooting Timothée Chalamet in the desert for Dune (2021)

Eric Blume:  Glenn and Elisa, Do we all agree that we probably have two "locks" for Best Cinematography nominations:  Delbonnel for The Tragedy of Macbeth, and Greig Fraser for Dune?  Those feel like two very worthy nominees to me.  While I think Joel Coen's conception of his film is limited and flawed, I admired Delbonnel's execution of Coen's concept, really leaning into that austere Calvinist guilt like we got in Carl Theodore Dreyer movies, and stealing from Sven Nykvist's framing in Bergman movies...yet netting out in its own unique visual scheme to highlight those sets and costumes.  And I thought Fraser's work made Denis Villeneuve's arid sci-fi epic surprisingly sensual, which helped the film (which is dense and heavy) enormously by taking you out of your head sometimes and back to your senses. Do you think both are locks?  What are your thoughts on those two, and their closest challengers... 

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Oscar Volley: Can anything dethrone 'Dune' in Best Production Design?

With just over a week until nominations are announced Cláudio Alves, Mark Brinkerhoff, and Nathaniel Rogers discuss the Best Production Design race…

DUNE is in it to win it.

CLÁUDIO: The Art Directors Guild of America recently announced their nominees, and I'm in love with the Period Feature lineup. The French Dispatch, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and West Side Story offer such a varied approach to the matter of scenography, either swinging towards hyper-stylization or aiming for immersive historical accuracy. Honestly, I'd be OK if AMPAS just copied the guild's picks, though that's not likely to happen. Not with Dune in the conversation. As far as I'm concerned, it'd be a massive surprise if Patrice Vermette's conception of a dilapidated future doesn't end up winning it all. The scale of the achievement is undeniable, the sense of monumentality and balance between Villeneuve's sense of severe sci-fi and Frank Herbert's Baroque descriptions.

The question, then, is which of the period nominees will get the chop and if there are other outside contenders to consider. Examining the history of AMPAS' relationship to Paul Thomas Anderson's flicks, my guess is that Licorice Pizza is the most vulnerable. What do you think, Mark? 

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Macbeth beyond "The Tragedy of Macbeth"

by Cláudio Alves

Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth is a beautiful experiment in bringing German Expressionism to 21st-century digital cinema. I could wax rhapsodic about its minimalist set designs and symbolic costumes, the crystalline black-and-white cinematography and ominous soundscape. Hell, there's a book's worth of material to be written about Kathryn Hunter's merge of avant-garde physical theater and Elizabethan dramaturgy. All that being said, and that Scripter nomination aside, the movie's a rather lousy Shakespeare adaptation. Despite pronouncements about trying to reinvent the Macbeths as a middle-aged couple, going deep into the psychology of two creatures whose youth is long gone, Coen doesn't go deeper than the surface. 

In the end, it's a standard reading of the play that serves as a foundation for all that style. The cinephile in me loved it, while the Shakespeare geek felt dispirited. However, there are enough Macbeth movies out there to please just about everyone. It all depends on what you're looking for… 

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USC Scripter Awards honor "Dopesick", Dune", "Passing" and more...

by Nathaniel R

The USC Scripter Awards are an annual event that is a gala fundraiser for the USC Libraries. The nominations are chosen by committee. They specifically honor the adaptations of printed works as well as the original authors. As such it's usually novels and plays that are honored. We're thrilled that Rebecca Hall's smart adaptation of Passing finally got some love. We don't know if West Side Story was ineligible but given that it's primarily canon due to its incredible musical score, it might not have felt literary enough in its original form to qualify? The nominations for film and television are after the jump...

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