Lest we forget the cinematographers…
By Craig Kennedy - January 7th, 2009; 5:06 pm
Oh yeah, the American Society of Cinematographers announced this morning too. Love the Deakins Revolutionary Road nod, but I would’ve switched Doubt for The Reader. Oh well, 2 out of 5 still isn’t bad.
- Roger Deakins, Revolutionary Road
- Roger Deakins and Chris Menges, The Reader
- Claudio Miranda, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
- Wally Pfister, The Dark Knight
- Anthony Dod Mantle, Slumdog Millionaire
Filed under: Awards
Tags: American Society of Cinematographers, ASC
I still haven’t seen 3 of these 5 movies, but at the moment my picks for best-shot movie this last year would be:
Paranoid Park (Christopher Doyle & Rain Li)
Standard Operating Procedure (Robert Richardson)
Let the Right One In (Hoyte Van Hoytema)
My Blueberry Nights (Darius Khondji)
The Dark Knight (Pfister)
Also, apparently a good friend of mine (Joe White) made the ASC’s 20-movie shortlist from which to pull nominations!
Good call Jeff, but I’ll swap out SOP with Wall-E for my picks. I’d give Benjamin Button an honorable mention too.
Before anyone argues there was no cinematography in a CGI movie, watch the Wall-E extras.
I agree, Craig — though I too doubt whether Deakins is complaining.
Let the Right One In should be on this list, as well, though that would mean negating what I just agreed to regarding Deakins’s work on The Reader and Doubt.
I’m not ready to give awards to virtual cinematography yet (and it was better in Ratatouille anyway).
Well it doesn’t matter because I’m certain the Academy has no interest in honoring virtual cinematography either, but I’d heartily disagree with you and state that the first hour of Wall-E moved the bar up a few notches for virtual cinematography. To my eyes, it’s the same level of breakthrough for CGI that LOTR’s Gollum brought to CGI characterization.
Anyway, I still like your noms better than theirs.
Yeah, whether you want to call it cinematography or not (as far as I’m concerned, the tools are different, but the results are the same), WALL-E and the like deserve some kind of recognition. I’d set WALL-E apart from Ratatouille because I don’t remember the Rat as having the look of being filmed with a camera the way WALL-E did.
I like Jeff’s picks of Paranoid Park and My Blueberry Nights though.
Off-topic, but the DGA nominations are up at Awards Daily.
No complaints on my part except for Opie.
The DGA nominations just helped The Dark Knight out rather enormously. This seems to point to Christopher Nolan being nominated (though the DGA and AMPAS do not always meet perfectly with one another in their nominations). Of the directors whose films were likely Best Picture nominees, he seemed the most vulnerable.
Opie has everyone hypnotized!