OVP: Best Cinematography (1999)
The Nominees Were...
Conrad L. Hall, American Beauty
Roger Pratt, The End of the Affair
Dante Spinotti, The Insider
Emmanuel Lubezki, Sleepy Hollow
Robert Richardson, Snow Falling on Cedars
My Thoughts: The further back we go, the more likely it is that we're going to run into names that modern Oscar watchers don't know by heart that were a genuinely huge deal in their day (i.e. life didn't start when you were born). You see here a few names that still command a lot of respect (Richardson, Lubezki) and could get a nomination even today if they had the right film, but in 1999, the biggest name in this bunch was Conrad L. Hall, who was receiving his penultimate Oscar citation (out of ten total) and had been working in movies since the 1960's, the steady hand behind such New Hollywood classics as Cool Hand Luke, In Cold Blood, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
American Beauty is a very different film from those, though it also invites a lot of color contrasts in the same way we think of some of that 1960's golden hour cinematography. The way that the camera plays with the suburban idealism here is really fascinating, having it feel like we're watching layers unfold in the film. The movie's much-copied approach to sexualization of some of its characters (specifically Mena Suvari's), with her opening her shirt and having hundreds of rose petals pour out, is really ingenious stuff, inventively leaning in on Mendes' dark satire and sexual taboo.
Like Hall's work in American Beauty, Dante Spinotti inspired a lot of copycats with The Insider. The film wasn't the first movie to employ this type of hyper-color screen look that would become extremely popular in the 2000's but it was the one that seems to have been a catalyst of the trend, particularly in the films of Steven Soderbergh and Clint Eastwood. Unlike some of the latter films where I think it works really well (Traffic, Letters from Iwo Jima), this one is in the middle. I find the blue-screen more distracting and reducing the richness of what we're seeing onscreen, specifically when it comes to the sharpness of the editing. I get why this was nominated, and it's not bad (none of these are-this is a really reputable list from the Academy), but I don't find it fulfilling in the way I do some of the other nominees.
I like Robert Richardson more than his nomination count on the My Ballots would indicate (he has two nominations in the time frame he got six Oscar citations, including two wins, which feels off but also-the My Ballot teaches us that two nominations should count for something). I think Snow Falling on Cedars, though, might be Richardson's finest work to date. It's gorgeous, moody cinematography, giving us a lot of light-in-nighttime. This is the only article we'll discuss the movie, so I'll point out it's almost painfully dull as a picture (if you've never heard of this movie, there's a reason for it), but it's breathtaking, Youki Kudoh and Ethan Hawke looking ravishing at every turn of the film. This is the kind of nomination that you might think just got in on Richardson's name alone, but it's better than that.
Emmanuel Lubezki, on the other hand, is one of the kings of the My Ballots of the 21st Century (eight nominations, all with medals, four of them gold). I think what he does in Sleepy Hollow is also quite special, though not as signature as Richardson's work. The moody gothic coloring of the film, along with the ways it feels like it was plucked from a storybook, make for one of the most enchanting looks I've ever seen in a live-action Tim Burton movie. It's a pity the two didn't work on more projects (this is their only collaboration to date) as Lubezki seemed to get Burton's aesthetic more than any other DP.
Our final nominee is Roger Pratt, who got his only nomination from Oscar for The End of the Affair (not to be the "My Ballot" guy, but I nominated him for one of his takes on Harry Potter, The Goblet of Fire). Pratt's work here is gorgeous, using a lot of rain cover & cloud cover (does the sun ever shine in this movie?) to give us a sense of the moodiness of this Graham Greene adaptation. The movie is probably at its best when it's super lusty (early on in the picture, Pratt wisely puts Ralph Fiennes's flawless bum center stage, making the audience as horny as Julianne Moore's character), but I don't think that for a film about forbidden passion we get enough of this. It looks good, but I left wanting a touch more from him.
Other Precursor Contenders: The American Society of Cinematographers went with American Beauty as its victor, besting the Oscar lineup save for The End of the Affair (they instead went with The Sixth Sense, while BAFTA also favored American Beauty, here against Angela's Ashes, The End of the Affair, The Matrix, and The Talented Mr. Ripley. I could buy either Sixth Sense or Talented Mr. Ripley in sixth place-the former is a Best Picture nominee with a distinctive (though highly-borrowed from in his later movies) color palette, while the latter is from John Seale, who just three years earlier had won an Oscar for his work in The English Patient, and was hallowed ground for the Academy by 1999.
Films I Would Have Nominated: I remain forever confused as to why the gorgeous movies of Pedro Almodovar are absent from this category, even when Oscar notices them in other fields. Case-in-point: the beautiful over-saturation of All About My Mother ties the entire melodrama together perfectly.
Oscar's Choice: Hall was unstoppable in 1999 with Best Picture winner American Beauty, even against sturdy competition like Lubezki & Richardson.
Oscar's Choice: Hall was unstoppable in 1999 with Best Picture winner American Beauty, even against sturdy competition like Lubezki & Richardson.
My Choice: In a first for me, I will be giving this award to Robert Richardson's Snow Falling on Cedars, whose movie may be boring but his camerawork is perfection. Behind him will be American Beauty, Sleepy Hollow, The End of the Affair, and then The Insider.
Those are my thoughts-how about yours? Do you want to look into the suburbs with American Beauty or do you want to get lost in the oil painting that is Snow Falling on Cedars? Do you have a favorite movie of Conrad L. Hall's? And was The Sixth Sense or The Talented Mr. Ripley in sixth place? Share your thoughts below!
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