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Nominations voting is from January 11–16, 2024, with official Oscar nominations announced on January 23, 2024. Final voting is February 22–27, 2024. And finally, the 96th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 10, and air live on ABC at 8 p.m. ET/ 5 p.m. PT. We update predictions throughout awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2024 Oscar picks.
The State of the Race
It’s become a cinematography race among five movies shot on Kodak film, with the large-format IMAX “Oppenheimer” (Universal) taking on the 35mm “Poor Things” (Searchlight), “Killers of the Flower Moon” (Apple TV+/Paramount), “Maestro” (Netflix), and “Saltburn” (Amazon/MGM). These were shot by cinematographers Hoyte van Hoytema, Robbie Ryan, Rodrigo Prieto, Matthiew Libatique, and Linus Sandgren.
Interestingly, “Oppenheimer,” “Poor Things,” and “Maestro” were all shot in both color and black-and-white, as part of a great stylistic tradition (from “The Wizard of Oz” to “JFK”) of intermingling color and monochrome to evoke heightened states of mind to help drive the narrative. “JFK” won the Oscar for Robert Richardson, so this hybrid factor will certainly play a role in the Oscar race.
Also in contention are Łukasz Żal for “The Zone of Interest” (A24), Erik Messerschmidt for “The Killer” (Netflix), Ed Lachman for “El Conde” (Netflix), Prieto for “Barbie” (Warner Bros.), Robert Yeoman for “Asteroid City” (Focus Features), Philippe Le Sourd for “Priscilla” (A24), Shabier Kirchner for “Past Lives” (A24), Dariusz Wolski for “Napoleon” (Apple TV+/Sony Pictures), Christopher Blauvelt for “May December” (Netflix), and Dan Laustsen for “The Color Purple” (Warner Bros.).
“Oppenheimer” represents the culmination of van Hoytema’s IMAX collaboration with Christopher Nolan. The duo achieves a new kind of intimate spectacle with this psychological thriller about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the “father of the atomic bomb.” The cinematographer uses the large-format IMAX camera to explore the landscape of faces; namely, Oppenheimer’s in color from his perspective and antagonist Admiral Lewis Strauss’ (Robert Downey Jr.) in black-and-white from his. A shout out to Kodak for engineering 65mm monochromatic film for IMAX. As a result, van Hoytema redefines portraits and close-ups for 70mm IMAX presentation. In addition, the cinematographer helped with the IMAX shooting of DNEG’s in-camera VFX to visualize the atomic bomb explosion and Oppenheimer’s quantum physics theories. For all of these reasons, van Hoytema (Oscar-nominated for “Dunkirk”) is the current favorite to win the Oscar.
Yargos Lanthimos’ twisted “Frankenstein” gender-bender is a more complex feminist, coming-of-age exploration than “Barbie,” shot by go-to cinematographer Robbie Ryan (Oscar-nominated for “The Favourite”). Bella (Emma Stone), a distraught Victorian woman, commits suicide and is re-animated by iconoclastic scientist Dr. Baxter (Willem Dafoe) with the brain of her unborn child. The first part of her rebirth is shot in expressionistic black-and-white, emphasizing the fish-eye lens to jarringly distort her feral perspective. Then she runs away on a series of whirlwind adventures and sexploits with and without slick and debauched lawyer Duncan (Mark Ruffalo). These are shot in color but especially color-reversal Ektachrome 35mm film. The use of various textures, contrast, and color with different stocks and lenses brilliantly conveys Bella’s bold transformation into a sexually liberated and independent woman way ahead of her time.
“Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s tragic historical crime drama, brings out the best in Prieto. It’s about the serial murders of the Osage Indians after oil is discovered under the Osage Nation land in 1920s Oklahoma. Shooting in 35mm, the three-time nominee (“The Irishman,” “Silence,” “Brokeback Mountain”) captures the beauty of the Indigenous culture and spirit (personified by Lily Gladstone’s Mollie Burkhart) with appropriate naturalistic colors and lighting. By contrast, the corrupt, evil world of Robert De Niro’s wealthy rancher is shot with a darker, moodier look.
Bradley Cooper directs and stars in this sweeping exploration of legendary conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein through the lens of his complicated marriage to Chilean-American actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Spanning more than 30 years, with Libatique (Oscar-nominated for “A Star Is Born”) shooting the first half in black-and-white and the second half in color. It’s a bittersweet love story about the couple becoming soulmates and how they later drift apart when Bernstein gets tangled up in contradictions revolving around musical superstardom and his hedonistic double-life with same-sex lovers.
“Saltburn,” Emerald Fennell’s black comedy about the cruel class divide in England in the mid-2000s, hurls Oxford student Barry Keoghan into the sprawling estate of aristocrat Jacob Elordi and his eccentric family for summer vacation. Oscar-winning Sandgren (“La La Land”) visually captures the institutional oppression of Oxford and the hallow beauty of the Saltburn estate as life-altering tipping points for outsider Keoghan.
Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” his disturbing Holocaust drama about the domestic family bliss within eyeshot of the Auschwitz camp, is shot with chilly precision by two-time Oscar nominee Żal (the black-and-white “Ida” and “Cold War”). He’s aided by the director’s innovative 360-degree sets, which had multiple cameras installed that were removed in post, providing “the unsettling quality of surveillance.” The most devastating shot, though, is the long view from the family’s garden path of the barb-wired wall and camp’s chimney beyond against a blue sky, no less.
David Fincher’s passion project, “The Killer” (Netflix), based on the graphic novel by Alex Nolent, finds Michael Fassbender’s meticulous assassin unable to “stick to the plan” when he makes a single mistake and his entire world starts unraveling. Oscar winner Messerschmidt (“Mank”) evokes a minimalistic noir with shades of “Zodiac” and “Mindhunter” for this tense actioner in Paris.
Pablo Larraín’s “El Conde” envisions Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) as a vampire seeking death in a black comedy, best described as “Nosferatu” meets “Succession.” Two-time Oscar nominee Ed Lachman (“Carol,” “Far From Heaven”) uses the lighter large-format Alexa Mini LF Monochrome camera (with Orson Welles’ preferred Ultra Baltar lenses) for a brilliant expressionistic black-and-white look that melds the modern with the classical.
In Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster “Barbie,” which is about transformational change for Margot Robbie’s eponymous Mattel doll, Prieto creates a visual dichotomy between the surreal innocence of Barbie Land and the real world of L.A.’s Century City. He’s at his best creating simple, complementary lighting to play off the director’s “TechnoBarbie” pink palette to go along with the cartoon-like lateral camera movement for Barbie.
For Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City,” about the meaning of existence and creativity, the Oscar-nominated Yeoman (“The Grand Budapest Hotel”) shot two distinct styles in 35mm: the desert town of 1955 in widescreen has a pastel look with natural light and soft diffusion, while the TV broadcast of its Elia Kazan-like theatrical origin and backstory is depicted in black-and-white and Academy ratio. It’s the perfect summation of what the director and his go-to cinematographer have achieved together.
Celine Song’s “Past Lives,” the sublime romance about childhood friends Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) who are briefly reunited online before reconciling in person after two decades, achieves a wonderful visual intimacy by Kirchner, who shot on 35mm. Nora and Hae Sung are never in the right place at the right time to achieve their destiny (in-yun), so there’s always tension. However, Nora and her husband, Arthur (John Magaro), experience in-yun and become soul mates. The brilliant opening scene in the bar poses the question: Who are they? And a masterful final long take when Nora and Hae Sung say goodbye provides the answer.
As for the rest: Todd Haynes delivers his own black comedy of self-delusion in “May December” (Netflix), in which Natalie Portman’s actress visits Julianne Moore’s notorious former school teacher in Maine to study her for a film about her tabloid sex scandal 20 years earlier. Blauvelt (who replaced Lachman after breaking his hip on “El Conde”) aims for high camp without the extreme stylization that Haynes is known for. “Napoleon” is about transformational change, which Ridley Scott and his Oscar-nominated cinematographer Wolski (“News of the World”) explore in the historical epic about the rapid rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) from military leader to Emperor, and his obsessive love for Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby). One of the highlights is the six battles, each with distinctive geometric patterns.
Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla” provides a counter perspective to Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis,” in which Cailee Spaeny’s teenage Priscilla attempts to escape the confines of Graceland to create her own identity apart from Jacob Elordi’s Elvis. It’s shot by Le Sourd with a stylization befitting this 20th-century princess. Blitz Bazawule’s “The Color Purple,” adapted from the Broadway stage musical and starring Fantasia Barrino as Alice Walker’s celebrated Celie and her lifelong struggles during the early 20th century South, gets the magical realism treatment from Oscar-nominated Laustsen (“Nightmare Alley,” “The Shape of Water”).
Potential nominees are listed in alphabetical order; no film will be deemed a frontrunner until we have seen it.
Frontrunners
Hoyte van Hoytema (“Oppenheimer”)
Matthiew Libatique (“Maestro”)
Rodrigo Prieto (“Killers of the Flower Moon”)
Robbie Ryan (“Poor Things”)
Linus Sandgren (“Saltburn”)
Contenders
Christopher Blauvelt (“May December”)
Shabier Kirchner (“Past Lives”)
Ed Lachman (“El Conde”)
Dan Laustsen (“The Color Purple”)
Philippe Le Sourd (“Priscilla”)
Erik Messerschmidt (“The Killer”)
Rodrigo Prieto (“Barbie”)
Dariusz Wolski (“Napoleon”)
Robert Yeoman (“Asteroid City”)
Łukasz Żal (“The Zone of Interest”)
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– Armessa Movie News