Elvis Snubbed For Cinematography Oscar, Continuing Academy's 95-Year Streak Of Not Awarding Women
"All Quiet on the Western Front" may have just won the Oscar for Best Cinematography, but it's the Academy's loss. In the 95-year history of the Academy Awards, only three women have ever been nominated for the award, and as of 2023, no woman has ever won.
You might think that sounds bad because there are five nominees every single year, which means only three out of 475 nominees have ever been women, but it's worse than that, because some years there were two separate categories for Best Cinematography, both Color and Black and White, and in multiple years there were as many as fifteen nominated films. We'll let someone who's better at math do the percentages, but needless to say, less than 1% of the nominees in the Best Cinematography category have been women. MUCH less.
And while we have lots of respect for James Friend's work on "All Quiet on the Western Front," a stark and striking motion picture that captures the brutality and futility of war, we also love and admire Mandy Walker's overwhelming achievement bringing the larger-than-life life of Elvis Presley to... well, life in "Elvis," covering a vast number of locations, moods and color schemes, the good and the bad of Elvis Presley's life, just like we admire her depressingly few forebears.
The power of cinematography
The first woman to be nominated for Best Cinematography was in 2017 when — what was that? Excuse me? Yes, I'm completely serious. It was 2017.
Rachel Morrison was nominated for Best Cinematography for "Mudbound," a sad and powerful epic about a white family whose lives are intertwined with the lives of a family of black sharecroppers. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Song and Best Supporting Actress. Morrison was passed over in favor of Roger Deakins, whose win for the sci-fi sequel "Blade Runner 2049" broke his 13-nomination losing streak.
Morrison, whose previous film credits included Ryan Coogler's debut feature "Fruitvale Station" and Rick Famuyiwa's acclaimed coming of age film "Dope," would go on to be director of photography on the billion-dollar grossing "Black Panther" — arguably the most stunningly photographed film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — and the Hollywood biopic "Seberg," starring Kristen Stewart. She's set to make her directorial debuted in the boxing biopic "Flint Strong," starring Ryan Destiny ("Grown-ish") and this year's Oscar-nominee for Best Supporting Actor, Brian Tyree Henry.
It would take four more years for the Academy to recognize — not award, but recognize — another cinematographer who wasn't a man.
The Power of the Dog
Ari Wegner's work on "The Power of the Dog," a powerful western about a frontier family unraveling due to the sinister machinations of a cruel brother-in-law, is meticulous and evocative. Her work captures the vastness of the American west and the cruel intimacy of the characters and their relationships. The film lost the Academy Award to Greig Fraser's stark and dusty "Dune," a big budget epic that also took home Oscars for Best Sound, Best Visual Effects, Best Original Score, Best Editing and Best Production Design. In contrast, "The Power of the Dog" — which had twelve nominations that year, more than any other movie — went home nearly empty-handed, winning only an Oscar for Jane Campion as Best Director. (It was the first film to Best Director and nothing else since "The Graduate" in 1967.)
Ari Wegner's career includes the acclaimed "Lady Macbeth," which featured Florence Pugh's first breakout role, Peter Strickland's horror film "In Fabric," and the Twitter-inspired road trip movie "Zola." In the short amount of time since "The Power of the Dog" she has already been the director of photography on the psychological drama "The Wonder," also starring Florence Pugh, and the upcoming thriller "Eileen," starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway.
Elvis
Mandy Walker has been working behind the camera since 1983, working her way up from Australian short films to classic music videos like "Big Me" from The Foo Fighters, and acclaimed motion pictures like "Lantana," "Shattered Glass," "Hidden Figures," and the live-action version of "Mulan." By all rights she probably should have been Oscar-nominated a long time ago, since her work has been winning awards since the mid-1990s.
"Elvis" is an impressive motion picture, capturing lightning in a bottle and history on camera. It takes a heck of a lot of discipline and acumen to take Baz Luhrmann's chaotic storytelling style and ground it in a consistent sense of reality, with shots that capture the eye in the briefest of flickers, and bring music into the physical plane through lighting and color and staging.
It's only a matter of time before the Oscars reward someone who isn't a man in the Best Cinematography category. Perhaps it will be one of these incredible artists who have already broken through the staggering 95 years of sexism already, but whoever it is and whenever it is — and it sure would be nice if it took less than another century — it will be a cause for celebration.
Until then, we wait. Impatiently.