One Category at a Time: Best Cinematography

You know how much I love guys like Chivo and Deakins and Richardson,
but I gotta be honest: It's soooooooooooo refreshing to see some new faces in the Best Cinematography race. With only a single previous nomination between the five of them, this year's nominees represent a future full of promise for the art form, and one of them will be nabbing their first Oscar.

'La La Land' Dances Off with DGA, 'Lion' Roars at ASC

Damien Chazelle and his La La Land directorial team took top honours from the Directors Guild of America last night, all but squashing any remaining doubt as to who this year's Academy Award Best Picture winner is going to be in three weeks.

What we can still ponder in the meantime is the extent to which it will dominate the Oscars. While many still anticipate a clean sweep, there's more than enough reason to suspect it's showing weakness in some categories. For instance, will the BAFTAs (next Sunday) and WGA Awards (the Sunday after that) imply Best Original Screenplay going to something like Manchester by the Sea, or perhaps even Hell or High Water? Will the two design categories go to period or fantasy efforts as they tend to do?

Even Best Cinematography has been thrown slightly into question after the American Society of Cinematographer's bestowed their top honour upon Greig Fraser for his beautiful work Lion, a beloved player this season that voters might feel is due a consolatory win in at least one category.

For now, there's still plenty to keep my interest up.

Review - Foxcatcher

If you're a fan of the sport of wrestling, you may be familiar with the story of the Schultz brothers, a pair of Olympic champs who caught the eye of a millionaire philanthropist following the '84 L.A. Olympics.

But you needn't be a wrestling buff to appreciate this stranger-than-fiction true story, brilliantly dramatized by Cannes prize winner Bennett Miller in Foxcatcher. Just like his swell previous feature Moneyball, what Miller has achieved here is a sports movie that's not actually about the sport, but about something far bigger and more elusive. Incidentally, like Moneyball was in 2011, Foxcatcher is also one of the finest films of the year.

Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) is obsessed with being the best, but doomed to never feel like the best. Even his Olympic gold medal seems outshone by that of his older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), whose personal life is far more fulfilled.

Dave is more famous, a better wrestler/coach, a happy family man, and still quietly exudes his protective instincts towards his baby bro. A beautifully staged sparring sequence early in the film between the two brothers tells us everything we need to know about their relationship with hardly a single word of dialogue.