Oscars Debate: 2007's Best Cinematography
The Oscars! They don’t matter! Okay, from a cultural standpoint, they matter in the sense that it’s interesting to see what Hollywood's values were in each respective year. And hey, maybe someone will see one or two of the movies because they were nominated for Oscars, which is always a good thing. However, as far as rewarding merit and steering proper discourse is concerned, the Oscars hold only as much weight as we give them, and we probably give them too much.
That said, as I wrote in the last debate article, I have a fascination with the Oscars. I don’t think they “matter” in the long run, but I like debating the nominees in whatever category because it forces you to assess the merits of a film you loathe or the flaws in a film you love. They can be an effective tool for discussion, and it’s in that spirit that I’ll occasionally seek out particularly difficult debates in certain categories in certain years. (In this case, “I” didn’t seek it out so much as Mikey brought it up in his episode about Zodiac which you should absolutely watch.)
Which brings us to the subject of this article: The 2008 race for best cinematography. Our nominees: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Atonement, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood. As of the time I’m writing this, I have rewatched all five of these films and taken notes and all the stuff you’re supposed to do before writing a nerdy article. However, after all this effort, I’m still not entirely sure which one I’d personally pick. That’s how hard this category is. However, before we make any arguments for or against any of the nominees, I think we need to clarify some things first.
What the Oscars Actually Reward vs. What I’ll Be Talking About/The Inherent Flaw in the Premise of This Article/The Narrative Merits of Cinematography
Last time, we talked about the best adapted screenplay category. Although I didn’t spend a lot of time making this point, part of what we talked about was how when it comes to the screenwriting categories, the Oscars don’t actually reward "best screenplay" so much as “best premise” or “best ideas” or “I liked that movie a lot and you wrote it, so I guess you deserve an award regardless of how effective the story was or whether the director and producers butchered your script and good god we in Hollywood treat writers like human garbage.”
It’s a little more cut and dry with best cinematography. What they’re really rewarding in this category is “best looking film.”
Which brings us to the problem with this article: As far as I’m concerned, all five of these films look stunning in their own right, and trying to say one is more beautiful than the other is, even by Oscars standards, a pointless discussion. So instead, let’s talk about storytelling.
I’m friends with a few cinematographers and people who’ve held the role of “director of photography” (Or “DPs” as I’ll probably be referring to them from now on. Yes, you in the back of the class, I hear you chuckling.) I hope the comment I’m about to make doesn’t ruffle their feathers too much, but here it goes: Despite what the Oscars reward, their first priority should not be making the shot look pretty. (Though, of course, that should never be far from their thoughts.) Their first job should be to help tell the story in the most effective way possible.
Let’s pretend that we’re watching the most boring scene I can think of at the moment: A man eating a bowl of cereal in his kitchen. Subtext and story wise, not much is happening. The man. His cereal. Probably some milk. But what if we placed the camera, say, underneath the man and we tilted the camera up? Now the man is towering over us, unconcerned with our needs or our existence, eating his cereal at us like we don't exist. Now what if we placed the camera at his eye level across the table? Then we’d effectively be in the room with him, metaphorically eating with him and relating to him on his level. What if we placed the camera above him and tilted it down. Now we’re gods, watching this small man live out his insignificant life eating his insignificant cereal.
Part of the DP’s job is to choose and arrange those shots. You may be thinking to yourselves that what I’m talking about is actually directing (and in some cases editing), and you’re not wrong. However, let’s assume that all these DPs had a say in the shot compositions, because they almost assuredly did. (Or they did if said DPs were worthy of their jobs and they had a director who was smart enough to listen to them.) Let’s assume that DPs have an artistic standpoint, and let’s reward their consciousness by not getting too into the nitty gritty over their job description, because that changes depending on who the director is and what they're making. Let’s reward their humanity.
Or at the very least, let’s assume that at some point, they said to the director, “Hey, you seem to want to accomplish X goal in this scene, and I think you need this shot because I think it would be the best way of accomplishing that." The director then said “Great idea!” and now they've contributed to the film and they've done something worthy of a cinematography award.
Cool. Now, onto the nominees.
The Case for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Cinematographer: Roger Deakins)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which from here on in I’ll be referring to as Assassination, is a goddamn gorgeous looking movie. But of course, you are the kind of cool person who looks up film credits on IMDB, and when you looked up this film, you noticed that it was shot by Roger Deakins and it suddenly became obvious to you why this film looks so great. Either that, or you didn’t know him by name, so you clicked on it and looked at all his other credits and felt a deep sense of personal shame for not knowing who he was in the first place.
(Also, if you’re like me, you watched the 2018 Oscars and when the announcer said that this was Deakins’s first win, your jaw hit the floor because you had assumed that Deakins has a closet in his house where if you were to open it, you’d be crushed to death by a million Oscar statues.)
Indeed, Assassination, on a purely technical camera whatever level, is the film in this category that has stood the greatest test of time, meaning that while some of the films on this list are starting to look older, Assassination looks like it was shot yesterday. And moving beyond pure mechanical detail, Assassination has that sense of visual scope you think of when you think of the greatest westerns. It is, simply put, a stunning looking film.
And to me, the best part of all its visual splendor is how it’s used against the genre it’s trying to evoke.
Let’s take a step back and ask ourselves a question: From a subtextual standpoint, what is Assassination actually about? What is it trying to say? There's a few points we could make, but if it were up to me, I would say that Assassination is a film about the follies of hero worship and the romanticization of the “wild west.” It’s about how we mythologize the old gunslingers and outlaws because they lived how they wanted to live and did what they wanted to do, but in reality, maybe they weren’t the best of people. Maybe Jesse James wasn’t a benevolent Robin Hood who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Maybe he was a violent anxiety ridden sociopath constantly on the edge and ready to kill on a whim. Maybe the world he’s from was just as cruel as he was.
So how do you shoot that story? It’s understandable that since you’re shooting what is essentially an anti-western, you shoot it in an antithetical style. Like a Godard film or something like that. (Also, if someone would like to shoot a western in the style of a French new wave film, please do, because I would watch that in a heart beat.) However, part of the genius of how Deakins shot Assassination is that instead of pulling away from the style of traditional westerns, he leans into it.
As I rewatched Assassination, something stuck out to me above all else, and that’s how throughout the majority of this film, Jesse James dominates the frame. Let’s take a look at the train robbery in the beginning of the film.
First, watch it a few more times and marvel at how gorgeous every shot looks. Or if you and I are of the same mind, briefly question how well that shot where the camera locks in with the train looks, and otherwise, continue marveling at how gorgeous every shot looks. Now, once you're done watching it and noticing how many gifted actors you've seen, did you notice how Jesse’s framed? Before he enters the train, he’s the only character who gets any whole frame to himself. Every character either has to share or stands in the background. Hell, one of those characters is our protagonist, and we don’t even know where he is throughout the robbery. (Or at least I think that's the case.) But Jesse gets the close-ups, the badass silhouettes, and he’s the one who gets to walk through the fog. Once we’re inside the train, other people are allowed their own shots, but almost all of it is framed to emphasize exactly where Jesse is in the room and what he decides to do.
When Jesse beats the railway employee and we get a true sense of who Jesse is, he’s still shot like a hero. He's framed like this throughout the rest of the film, even when he kills his own gang members and slowly starts to lose his mind to depression and paranoia. He never stops dominating the frame, and that’s the entire point. Jesse James was not a hero, yet we frame him like one.
The west was nothing to bat our lashes at either. It may seem like it was because we revere those old photos that Deakins was able to replicate in his lens. But the west was violent and uncaring, no matter how we choose to compose our stories. Film it as gorgeously as you want. In the end, the west was just a bunch of angry white men shooting each other for money. What we think of when we think of the west wasn't real. Fitting then that Assassination was shot like something out of a dream.
The Case for Atonement (Cinematographer: Seamus McGarvey)
Yes, we’ll talk about that shot. Truth be told I don’t have a lot to say about the shot, but if you’re writing an article about cinematography and Atonement, you kind of have to talk about the shot. Also, I’ll take any excuse I can to embed the shot and thus have an excuse to rewatch it. It is, after all, a very good shot. But let’s talk about everything else first.
Atonement is, in many ways, the most traditional film in this category. Though it would be easy to read the previous sentence and extract it as criticism, that’s not what I meant to do. I merely meant “traditional” in the sense that Atonement is a big sweeping historical (somewhat) epic that centers on doomed love and war and other grandiose themes, and it’s very much the kind of film that one sees and thinks, "This is going to get nominated for best picture." One could watch Atonement and see the legacy laid before it by films like The English Patient and Cold Mountain and, in a certain sense, Titanic. (Yes, I realize Cold Mountain wasn't nominated for best picture. Leave me alone.)
Though I personally think Atonement is a much more interesting version of those kinds of films, as far as its visual elements are concerned, it does look a lot like them. Epic shots of destruction and war, handsome english men standing in fields, women walking the London streets with dozens of period appropriate cars driving around in the background. Of course, I’m describing what’s in the frame as opposed to how it’s shot. I’m just pointing these elements out because, to me at least, they conjure a certain kind of “best picture” aesthetic, and Atonement doesn’t stray too far from what you’re probably imagining.
That said, this is still a beautiful looking movie, and there’s a reason why audiences and Oscar voters are drawn to films that look like Atonement. In fact, Atonement has plenty of visual ingredients that not many of the other films in this category offer. The primary one I want to focus on is color.
True, three of these films take place in the American west, thus there’s a lack of color almost by necessity, and the next film we’ll be talking about mostly takes place in a more sterile environment with less warm colors. (Although Diving Bell does have some striking reds which we might talk about.) However, I’m a sucker for a bright color palette, to the point where I’m willing to forgive films that are a little too self-indulgent in that regard.
Atonement almost crosses that line in its first act, when we’re in the elaborate country estate.
(I feel like a douchebag for using the Keira Knightley see-through dress scene, but this is the best quality act one clip I could find. Apologies.)
As you can see, the estate looks almost as if it were out of a dream. Every color (particularly the greens) pop to their maximum effect, and every frame looks almost like a Monet painting. Then shit goes down hill and the colors appear much more muted.
It’s a simple trick that’s easy to notice, but it’s effective because it does a fantastic job telling the story. And the most impressive part to me is that those colors are still very much there in the later sections of the film. But they’re muted because there isn’t that much light, whether it’s because the characters now live in drab apartments in the city or because there is literally so much smoke from explosions and so many clouds one can project a metaphor or two onto that it’s blocking out the sun.
Atonement, or at least the film version (I haven’t read the book), is a film about an idyllic time that gets shattered forever by a poor decision and the yearning to make up for said decision and go back to when things were romantic and just plain nice, even if you know in your heart of hearts that this was never actually the case. (Looking at you, Benedict Cumberbatch’s character.) Thus it's kind of perfect then that the beginning is shot almost too bright and pretty before everything goes dark, and the scope doesn't hurt.
At times, I may seem down on this movie’s look, but I actually feel like there’s a legitimate argument to be made for it winning. What I sound like I'm describing is a film that looks cliché, but what I'm really talking about is a film that looks old school.
Now let’s talk about the shot. For those of you unfamiliar with the shot I’m talking about, it’s the four and a half minute tracking shot of Robbie and his fellow soldiers walking through the beach at Dunkirk and getting a first hand look at the nightmare that their lives have been reduced to:
I love me a good self-indulgent tracking shot. The more elaborate and film school wet dreamy, the better. Yes, they can be distracting and they can put a big ol’ neon sign on your film that says “HEY AUDIENCE, YOU’RE WATCHING A FILM AND NOW I'M GOING TO RUB YOUR FACE IN IT!” But I love them nonetheless because they can be incredibly affective if done correctly, and if the point is to have your character take in all the horrors and surreality of war all at once, then doing an uninterrupted shot through Dunkirk is a hell of a way to do it.
The Case for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Cinematographer: Janusz Kaminski)
If “best cinematography” meant “most narratively interwoven cinematography,” than The Diving Bell and the Butterfly might be our winner. In case you haven’t seen it (which you should, though prepare to be in that "I just saw an incredibly sad movie" daze), the film tells the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of Elle magazine who suffered a massive stroke in 1994 that left him mentally intact, but physically only able to move his left eyelid. Despite this, he decides to write his memoir, and does so by utilizing a system his nurses and doctors created and blinks the whole book one letter at a time with a transcriber.
Much of the film is told from Bauby’s perspective, and from a purely practical standpoint, it does an amazing job conveying the fact that we’re seeing the world through one eyeball. There's always a section of the frame that’s slightly blurry, or at least not as clear as a certain concentrated area. We can never see whole rooms, and sometimes we have trouble following people's movements as they go in and out of Bauby's line of sight.
It’s an impressive feat of technical work, but it’s even more impressive because it’s not just a gimmick. It’s a creative choice that’s pulled off in such a way that it’s never distracting and only serves to enhance the story. It cements us into the world as opposed to putting us at a distance. We see this universe literally through Bauby's eyes. Not our own obnoxious film buff vision.
And to me at least, the most impressive part of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’s cinematography is that on top of being impressive from a technical and narrative standpoint, it’s also quite pretty:
Now, of course because you’re inquisitive and awesome, you looked up Janusz Kaminski’s previous work, and if you weren’t familiar with him before, I’m sure your eyes must’ve almost popped out of your head when you read all his credits. But even if you’re as accomplished and talented as someone like Janusz Kaminski, if I were brought on to shoot something like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly that had to balance a specific device with having to look great and tell a story in a meaningful way, I’d be shitting my pants. We take the balance of practicality and pure visual aesthetic for granted. We really shouldn’t.
And now that I’ve said all this, I suddenly have to remind myself that much of this movie is shot outside of Bauby’s paralyzed vision as well. However, though there are some scenes of regular hospital minutia and visiting friends that are shot in a relatively simple manner, most of the time when we’re outside Bauby’s eyes, we’re still in his perspective, either in his memories or in a fantasy.
When we’re in his memories, the camera's either floaty and all over the place or relatively intact, depending on how vivid the memory is and the point of why he's remembering it. When he remembers, as we see above, going to the photo shoot, the camera rarely stays still and the angles are all over the place, suggesting that it's not really this photo shoot he remembers, but the nebulous glamor whirlwind of being the editor of a prestigious fashion magazine. When we see his stroke towards the end of the movie, the camera only stays still when we're outside his perspective. After all, it'd be hard to remember your own stroke.
Some memories are shot more clearly. When Bauby shaves his father or when he remembers his trip to Lourdes, the camera's still and the movements and angles are more conventional, suggesting the memory's more vivid. Similarly, when we're in one of his fantasies, we get (again, relatively speaking) a clearer sense of what we're looking at. We float along with Bauby when he's in his diving bell and we glide slowly along the hallway when he's telling us about the history of the hospital. When his mental vision is clear, so are the shots. When they're more abstract, the camera follows suit.
If you've seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, you know that it speaks for itself. I said in the beginning of this section that Diving Bell is the most narrative minded cinematography in this section, but as I write all of this, I now realize that it’s also the most unique. When we get to the verdict section, we’ll get into my gripes and my microscopic hair splitting, but as for right now, I wish more films like Diving Bell were considered come Oscar season. It’s the strangest looking film in this category for sure, but it’s also the least safe, and thus the most special.
The Case for No Country for Old Men (Cinematographer: Roger Deakins)
Deaky Deak strikes again! The Deakster. Lord Deakington III. The Deakmiester. Pretend that I continued this riff for several more paragraphs and that it was ever funny in the first place.
Odds are that if you're reading this, you’ve seen No Country for Old Men, and thus I assume that at this point, you’ve already figured out why you find it special. (Or you hate it because of how anticlimactic it is. I don't agree, but I get it.) Maybe it’s Javier Bardem and his now legendary portrayal of Anton Chigurh. Maybe you love the thematic depth and the meditations on being consumed by a forever churning system of violence and destruction. Maybe you’re someone like me who thinks the anticlimax is the entire point and is meant to illustrate how we all think a hero can save us or that we can get out of our problems if we just stick both literally and metaphorically to our guns, but then you’re murdered in a motel room right as your knight in shining armor shows up and all of the sudden the pointlessness of it all causes your knight to quit his job.
I love all these elements as well. I’ve felt that way ever since I saw it in the theater. But if I’m being a thousand percent honest with myself, my favorite aspect of No Country for Old Men is the fastidiousness. Maybe this is just a strange quirk of my personality, but I love watching almost needlessly methodical problem solving. I love what it says about a character that they’re impulse for obtaining a briefcase they stashed in an air vent in another room is to get a bunch of tentpoles and build a contraption with some wire hangers to fish it out or when they see a man slumped next to a tree with a briefcase, instead of assuming he's dead, they wait a long time just to make sure there’s absolutely no movement, then approach.
(Weird tangent: Part of the reason I love watching Mike Ehrmantraut on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul is this same sense of hyper competency, and yes, I would watch a whole show of Mike just fixing or building things while being grumpy.)
I realize that I’ve only described the actions of Josh Brolin’s character Llewelyn Moss, but each of our primary players, including Anton Chigurh and Ed Tom, have this same sense of know-how. These are people, all likely having some sort of military or law enforcement training, of equal skill. What sets them apart is their worldview. What they’re willing to do and why they’re willing to do it.
I mention all this partially because I don’t have that much to say about the narrative elements of No Country for Old Men’s cinematography, but mostly because I think that it best illustrates what I love about the way this movie looks. Mainly that unlike Assassination, No Country doesn’t go out of its way to be so pretty that it hits you in the face or so iconic that it becomes the first thing you think about when you hear the name of the movie. No Country is no nonsense work first cinematography, the kind that works the best when you’re telling a story about no nonsense work first kind of people.
Let’s take a look at that coin flip scene.
There are less than ten different shots in the scene. (That depends on what you’re counting as “different” shots, but you know what I mean.) What we are seeing is an innocent man who’s lived in Texas all his life being toyed with and eventually threatened by a man with no code who has no qualms with killing anyone for any reason. And yet, I would argue that we don’t actually feel that danger until the camera starts slowly pushing in on the gas station owner and Chigurh from the over-the-shoulder shots we’ve already seen before. It’s a masterful job of establishing a set of visual rules then selectively breaking them to maximize the tension. And it does all this in the span of a few minutes.
When I talk about cinematography enhancing storytelling, this is precisely what I’m talking about. It’s not about doing what looks the best or what an audience expects to see when they hear about a movie that involves drug cartels and bloody shoot outs. It’s about making the most effective choice in achieving a particular goal, an attitude that permeates throughout the decisions the characters make and the way the filmmakers choose to film them.
All of No Country looks like this, and as a result, it easier to understand these characters approach to problem solving. Llewelyn preparing a sawed off shotgun and his tentpole contraption is shot with the exact same practicality as Anton shooting someone in the head or stealing medical equipment. It's all a means to an end. Flare wouldn't serve any purpose.
That said, I hope none of what I said is misconstrued as a way of saying this movie doesn't look great. Because that's almost objectively wrong. Even without No Country's workman like approach, it's still a gorgeous film. No, I still don’t know who the winner is yet.
The Case for There Will Be Blood (Cinematographer: Robert Elswit
I’ve been trying to refrain from talking about my overall opinions of these films outside of their cinematography. It’s easy to say you can be objective, and objectivity is easier when you’re dissecting specific parts of a movie as opposed to talking about it as a whole, let alone considering who should win in a stupid trophy ceremony. That said, if you’re like me, you’re prone to bouts of pettiness, and in the back of your mind you still root for the movie you like the most.
Of all the films in this category, There Will Be Blood is certainly the one I like the most. In fact, if we’re being completely honest, it’s the one I like the most by several orders of magnitude, and when people were having No Country for Old Men versus There Will Be Blood debates back in ’07, I was on team TWBB with the quickness of a giant metal pole landing on your head in the bottom of an oil shaft.
All of this is to say that yes, I am a little biased, and yes, I’m more than at peace with the fact that Robert Elswit walked away with the award. But let’s try to be objective, I wrote implying that this is a problem both of us have. What merits, besides the obvious, does There Will Be Blood actually have that I can extrapolate from my own obnoxious fandom of this film?
I would argue that a lot of what I said about No Country for Old Men could also be said about There Will Be Blood in that both, I think, subscribe to a utilitarian style of filmmaking. Or at the very least, There Will Be Blood doesn’t go out of it’s way to make every shot look like it should be hung up in a museum. Not that every film needs to be locked into a decision where it needs to pick an emphasis on aesthetic or an emphasis on communicating information, but when it comes time to shoot a scene, you’re trying to accomplish a certain goal, and I think There Will Be Blood puts a greater emphasis on conveyance.
The difference, however, is the kind of information that’s being passed along. Let’s keep this threatening meeting theme going with the scene from There Will Be Blood where Daniel threatens to cut the man from Standard Oil’s throat.
Like the No Country scene, it’s shot in a simple style. The shot count is low and the camera only moves when an emphasis needs to be made. But what are we seeing? (And what does it have to do with cinematography when what we seem to be talking about is actually editing?) Notice how long the camera lingers on Daniel in the center of the frame while he seethes at the mention of his son. We occasionally cut to Henry or the Standard men, but most of the time, we stay on Daniel.
What was important in the No Country scene is who is speaking and what they’re saying. It’s about grounding us in the scene and making us feel nervous about the fate of the poor gas station attendant. In the There Will Be Blood scene, what's important is how everything makes Daniel feel. What they’re talking about is a deal to let Standard move the oil Daniel’s been mining out of Little Boston. What the scene's actually about is Daniel’s feelings about sending his son to boarding school after he’s been rendered deaf and how he’s projecting his shame onto these business men. As such, we’re closer on Daniel when he accepts the Coyote Hills deal, but then we’re further away when the conversation turns to what he could be doing with his time and the situation with his son. He feels smaller, thus the frame sets him up as such.
Again, the boundaries between what is cinematography and what is editing and directing are becoming blurrier in what I’m talking about. But if we temporarily accept the definition of cinematography as a base “what we are seeing on screen” and we assume the DP shot the shots he shot for a reason, then I would argue that There Will Be Blood’s cinematography feels the most authorial out of any of the films in this category. That the shots Elswitt and director Paul Thomas Anderson chose not only convey information and look great, but they’re also designed to make you feel a certain a way, and in the process, that may direct your attention away from what’s literally happening on screen and onto the subtext.
Of course, all the films in this category achieve this on some level, but in rewatching all five of the films for this article, this element stuck out to me the most in There Will Be Blood. As I wrote in my notes, “Every shot makes you feel everything.” If Atonement has the most colors and No Country has the most utility and so on and so forth, There Will Be Blood, to me, has the most intent.
The Part Where I Slam My Brain Against My Desk Until My Pick For A Winner Comes Out
I wish I had the time and the energy to write more about the cinematography of all these films with the love they deserve before I blithely dismiss them from my stupid arbitrary Oscars debate article. But as you could tell from the dwindling length of each section, I don’t. So let’s take a “rip the band-aid off” approach.
The first film I eliminated in my head was No Country for Old Men. I know that might sound a little nuts, but the Deakster could only win for one of his two movies, and I’m more impressed by his work in Assassination than No Country by virtue of it being more aesthetically resplendent and thematically rich. The next movie I eliminated in my head was Atonement. It pained my soul to cut the most colorful movie, and arguably the movie with the largest visual scope. But on the other hand, as I said, Atonement is also the most conventional looking film in this category, and as much as I don’t have a problem with that, it doesn’t stick out in my mind as much as some of the others. The third film I eliminated was The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. As gorgeous as Diving Bell is, the way the film has to be shot also makes it less visually consistent in a way that always kind of bothers me despite how unique it is. On its own merits, it's incredible. When dumb lines in the sand must be drawn, I want something a little less all over the place.
To me, this is a debate between Assassination and There Will Be Blood, and I don’t really have a gun-to-my-head knee-jerk answer. What we essentially have here is a battle between two different philosophies: Assassination uses a massive sweeping visual aesthetic that feeds into the point of the movie and There Will Be Blood looks less epic, but also seeks to hit you on a more visceral level. In other words, this a debate between a film that uses its cinematography to distance the audience for a specific effect and a film that uses it to build tension and lock you into the moment.
In the end, if this were only about which film looks better from a strictly aesthetic standpoint, I think Assassination would be our winner. In fact, if we’re judging this category from the Academy’s usual viewpoint, where “most” cinematography usually wins over “most effective” cinematography, it’s kind of crazy that Assassination didn’t actually win. But we’re not just talking about looks. What we’re talking about is the marriage of visuals and effective storytelling.
So yes, I think the Academy made the right call. Were I in charge of who wins and who doesn’t, I would’ve picked There Will Be Blood.
There Will Be Blood may not be as iconic looking as Assassination, and the reasons you probably remember it have less to do with its look and more to do with the writing and Daniel Day-Lewis giving one of the greatest performances in the history of cinema. However, there’s a certain quality the cinematography of There Will Be Blood has that Assassination has to a lesser extent, and that’s a sense of vision. A sense that only this director and this DP could make a film that looks like this, whereas Assassination looks like Deakins was given free reign to go hogwild. (This is certainly untrue. Andrew Dominik is an incredible director with an equally incredible sense of visual style. I'm merely struggling with how to make my point.)
Put it another way: I’ve seen films that look like Assassination before. And in the years after Assassination's release, I've seen films that try its specific bag of tricks. I’ve yet to see something that looks quite like There Will Be Blood because its look is so well tailored to the story it tells and the way you're supposed to feel when you watch it.
But here’s the thing: You can read everything I just said and declare “Horseshit!” And you know what? You’re not wrong. I’m still doubting myself over my pick, and I probably always will. However, that’s a good thing. In an ideal world, every Oscar category is this hard. Every stupid pop culture debate requires you to be this nit-picky and anal. In an even more ideal world, we wouldn’t be pitting movies against each other at all and just acknowledge and delight over how gorgeous all five of these films are.
Sadly we don’t live in this world, and even more sadly, I love these dumb conversations too much to ever be able to give them up. I think There Will Be Blood deserves the arbitrary trophy over the other films. I also think it should’ve won best picture, but that’s for another day.
