My Award nominations: Cinematography

This is perennially my favourite category, and as it is every year, there was an abundance of excellent work to choose from. The Academy and I match up 3/5 this year. Find out which three they are, and what other two films I included as having the Best Cinematography of 2012 after the cut (complete with my fav shot from each nominee):

Review - Beasts of the Southern Wild

A remarkable meditation on the balance of nature and the inevitability of change, rookie feature director Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild chronicles the life-changing odyssey of a little girl and her small community as they attempt to keep their way of life afloat following a cataclysmic event.

Six-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis plays Hushpuppy, a fiercely curious child with simple yet profound knowledge about the way the universe fits together. In her bayou shanty town affectionately entitled The Bathtub (a marvelously constructed film environment that brims with character), she lives with her father Wink (Dwight Henry) and an assortment of free-range pets whose heartbeats she is always listening for – a reassurance that the pulse of the universe is still ticking. When news comes that a terrific storm approaches their low-lying tract of land, many head for higher ground, but Wink and a handful of other holdouts stubbournly stay to spite this catastrophic occurrence. Meanwhile, ancient beasts known as aurochs – think Erymanthian Boar, but bigger – are thawed out of the southern polar icecaps, and migrate north out of hunger towards the now sunken Bathtub. With their homes below water, the ragtag group of swamp dwellers band together and eke out a survival plan, while Hushpuppy watches and learns, all the while looking for a way to fix the broken piece of the universe and set things right once more.