One Category at a Time: Cinematography

With only 24 days until the Oscars, it's time to run down the categories and make some official predictions. I'll start off with some of the categories I consider fairly settled, and among them is Best Cinematography.

My Awards nominations: Cinematography

My nominees for Cinematography are:

Drive (Newton Thomas Sigel):

L.A. is sleekly conveyed through Sigel's luminous photography; a mesmerizing display of soft lighting and focus to offset the brutality of the content.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Jeff Cronenweth):

The film may be an empty exercise in style, but such style! The green-saturated coloration fits the murky story nicely. Some experimental shots work well.

Midnight in Paris (Darius Khondji, Johanne Debas):

The midnight sequences are beautifully shot with warm, textured lighting, before jolting us back into Gil's painful present with the hard, bright light of day.

The Tree of Life (Emmanuel Lubezki):

Be it the indelible vastness of an otherworldly shore, or the minute delicacy of a floating butterfly, Lubezki's compositions are lush and hypnotic.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (Seamus McGarvey):

McGarvey captures Eva's adhesive guilt through dozens of arresting (if not subtle) images symbolic of bloodstained hands with deep, cascading reds.

Just missed: The Artist, Bullhead, Hell and Back Again, Hugo, War Horse,
Miss Bala, Moneyball, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Martha Marcy May Marlene

Review - We Need to Talk About Kevin

They say there's no greater grief than that of a mother who loses her child, but what about that of a mother who is hated by her child? In We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay uses bold cinematic strokes to immerse us in the guilt, anguish, and confusion of a woman whose son holds an inexplicable personal vendetta against her, leading up to an atrocity that shatters more than just her life.

Tilda Swinton plays Eva, a practically catatonic woman struggling to lead a normal life in the wake of a hinted-at tragedy that left her without her family and reviled by her community. Through her daily drudgery she comes across sights and sounds that trigger memories that inform us about how she came to her current pitiable station. At first, the recollections are a vague but vivid wash of colour and sound; deep reds cascade across the screen while sirens and lawn sprinklers bleed in and out of the soundtrack.