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.

Review - Life of Pi

Shipwreck survivor Pi Patel has a harrowing story which an interviewer has been told “will make him believe in God”. Ang Lee's bold translation of the Yann Martel bestseller Life of Pi may not quite be able to do that, although it certainly gets you to thinking about such things as religious philosophy. For some, the film could inspire epiphanies about one's own beliefs. For others, not so much. If nothing else, at least it'll make you believe the craftspeople of this high-seas odyssey are gods for creating such divine imagery.

Pi (short for Piscine) is moving from India with his family and the zoo animals they own, intent on selling the creatures and starting a new life in Canada. When a deafening storm sinks the ship and everybody else on board, Pi is left stranded on a lifeboat with no company besides a lame zebra, an excitable orangutan, a hungry hyena, and a ferocious Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. The bulk of the film presents Pi's fight for survival; a test not only of his physical and mental ingenuity, but of his faith as well.