The irony on Academy Award night was that once the Oscars settled on Anora as the night’s biggest winner, iit actually capped an award season that had never quite settled on a single, unifying film before. And perhaps it was the evening’s craft awards that more truly reflected that diversity.

That season kicked off in earnest with the Golden Globes, where The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez won, just ahead of the L.A wildfires, in what already seems like another age.  And Demi Moore, in what then felt like a bit of upset, seemed to immediately cement her best actress chances with her speech, further underscored at the SAG Awards, where actors – the largest bloc of Academy voters – again rewarded her performance in a film where she even manages to out-melt an Oz witch.  SAG also concurred with the BAFTAs and gave Conclave their “best ensemble” award – their equivalent of best picture.

That, in turn, seemed to solidify some late congealing momentum for the Vatican thriller, – but then again, Anora’s Mikey Madison upset Moore there too in the actress category. Still, the hunches in Oscar’s press room were that Moore was still the favorite, with questions being prepped about how rarely horror film performances are nominated at all, and  how much rarer still when they win. Though the most ironic no-longer- applicable question of the night remains the one about whether Hollywood is still ignoring actresses over 50. So, when Madison pulled off the Oscar upset, it also felt like Conclave’s chances were gone too, and Anora would win best picture.

Though in fairness, perhaps Anora’s Palme d’Or win was the initial, um, tea leaf about where this was all headed. 

And to be clear, it is an entirely engaging, ultimately largehearted film, which may be a large part of its appeal in times like these. Its writer/director Sean Baker is clearly steeped in that same innate generosity, which shows through in his movies,  and was evident with him time and again on the award show trail. 

Though while Oscar’s craft honours were, as noted, parcelled out to other films – including those like Wicked, once viewed for a moment as a best picture frontrunner itself, though ultimately winning for production design and costumes – the exception was the editing award, which went to Baker. He also won for his original script, and said backstage he considered editing part of his writing process, joking that he saved the film from its director, in post.  His end-to-end creative process clearly worked, as he became the first person to win four Oscars for the same film, on the same night. 

Dune: Part Two – like Wicked, another best picture nominee – won for sound and visual effects.  Since the awards are handed out in different order each time (with “best picture” saved for the end of course), this year found your busy correspondent asking Dune’s VFX team about their collaboration with also-nominated cinematographer Greig Fraser ASC ACS and all the other department heads who were singing each other’s praises – and those of director Denis Villeneuve  for fostering such a collaborative atmosphere –when Part One made an even more substantial march through the crafts awards, in 2022. This, just as the front-of-house monitors were showing that Fraser himself would not repeat, as Lol Crawley BSC was winning for his shot-on-film work for The Brutalist. 

Visual effects production supervisor Paul Lambert (who has won Oscars each of the four times he was nominated, including now three times with Villeneuve), said that same collaboration was “absolutely key to the success of visual effects. If [they’re] done in their own little world it can become very clinical […] Whereas you’re on set with some of the best in the world. Why would you not ever use as much as you can from that? You know, people like Greig and [ makeup department head] Donald [Mowat]. But, you know [when] you’re overseen by a visionary director [you can]  cut certain corners in the way you shoot things because you know it’s not gonna be chaos, and you know what the end result is going to be.”

When Crawley came backstage, he also gave a collegial shoutout to production designer Judy Becker, as we followed up on a conversation we’d had with him just days earlier at the Kodak FIlm Awards, held in the venerable film maker’s (in the literal sense of “manufacturing celluloid”) own Sunset Boulevard “Kodak House,” a historical facility that hosts seminars, events – and of course, happily encourages and supplies celluloid for the seemingly growing number of filmmakers – in the colloquial sense – looking for alternatives, or complements, to digits. 

There, after he’d won their “Lumiere Award” (“In recognition of extraordinary artistry, discernment, and unyielding perspective in the field of cinematography”), we chatted a about his approach to The Brutalist, in a film that was his third collaboration with director (and co-writer) Brady Corbet.  Crawley mentioned the challenges of capturing a static art form – like architecture – with a fluid one, like film. Rather than referencing other filmmakers, he found that he and Corbet instead were looking at a lot of mid century painting and photography. Which may or may explain the production’s revival of a mid century format like VistaVision to shoot in. Though Kodak’s Motion Picture and Entertainment Head Vanessa Bendetti said they were fielding lots of inquiries about the widescreen format now. 

Picking up on the conversation, and the static/fluid contradictions, some hundred hours later and a few miles east, in the Oscar press room, Crawley said it was “an interesting conundrum for a cinematographer because the film is about brutalist architecture […] So the conversations I had with Brady were about the second half of the film, when the institute becomes manifest and it’s like, what does that feel like to the audience and to someone had László Tóth existed, had he built these incredible buildings in the brutalist architectural style, how would that have felt? 

“So a lot of it was obviously about choice of focal length, was about height of camera, was about movement, was about speed of traveling through these spaces.”

Crawley also talked about the end of the film (spoiler alert, folks!) where Van Buren, the wealthy patron-with-an-agenda played by an also Oscar-nominated Guy Pearce, has disappeared completely, perhaps in the very depths of the building that (Oscar winning!) Adrien Brody’s Tóth had designed for him. 

“At the end of the movie when they’re looking for Van Buren, we sort of finally understand… I mean there’s a moment in the movie where we see the altarpiece, the Carrara marble altarpiece. We see everything coming together, all of this, all of these things that László has spoken about in terms of the light coming down and forming the cross on the altarpiece. It was originally sort of revealed earlier in the movie and the more that we worked on the film, the more Brady realized that that should be kept back, so the flashlight, the gag with the flashlight and things, at the very end you finally see it (i.e., light coming through in the form of a crucifix.). 

“But there’s this interesting thing because you know, the crucifix is a very strong signifier of death,and then you tilt up and it’s an inverted crucifix, so there are many things that are sort of implied for the audiences. I mean it’s the best thing about film, that audiences can kind of, interpret it in their own way,”

Or certainly about some films – as opposed to say, the average studio tent pole – but this was a year where films embracing a kind of ambiguity, and mostly produced outside that studio system, primarily dominated the awards landscape. Films like not only The Brutalist and Anora, but Nickel Boys, The Substance, and animated film winner Flow (the latter giving the country of Latvia its first-ever Oscar). 

Even fare like Netflix’s Maria, which ostensibly embraces a conventional genre like the biopic, approaches its subject in a nonconventional way, compressing its story of the great opera diva Maria Callas into her last few days in Paris, using flashbacks, non-linear narrative and fantasy sequences to tell not only of her life, but of its might-have-beens and did-she-really? moments. All in a variety of film formats. 

Shot by the legendary Ed Lachman ASC, collaborating once again with Chilean director Pablo Larrain (for whom he also shot last year’s nominated dictator-as-vampire barely-a-metaphor film El Conde), Maria – as essayed by Angelina Jolie – won the ASC’s own theatrical feature film award  – with a nominee list that included not only presumed favorites like Dune: Part Two and The Brutalist, but in keeping with the themes of the season, also diverged from the Academy’s with the inclusion of Alice Brooks ASC, Stéphane Fontaine, AFC, and Phedon Papamichael ASC, GSC, GCA, for their work on Wicked, Conclave, and A Complete Unknown, respectively.

Ahead of the ASC ceremony, Lachman told us of only having four hours to film the scenes at Milan’s fabled La Scala – giving him basically 45 minutes to set the lights, then relying on the fabled opera house’s own stage techs for help during the shoot.

When accepting his award at the end of evening, he declared himself “in disbelief,” and that all the nominees were equally worthy of accolades. He also joked that earlier in his career he was skeptical of a group like the ASC, citing Groucho Marx in saying he wouldn’t want to join any club that would have him as a member. But, he declared, the group had really become much more like a family.

A few nights later, when receiving the Career Achievement Award at Kodak, he talked of using 35, 16 and Super 8mm formats for Maria, even being gifted the very Super  8 camera he’d used on the shoot, by Bendetti. Lachman cited his many mentors and teachers along the way, including famed documentarian Albert Maysles, saying that when he was shooting the 80s-era Desperately Seeking Susan, “I could never tell him it was a narrative film – (instead) I told him it was a documentary about Madonna.” 

As for this year’s actual documentary race – Madonna notwithstanding – there was also a split in terms of the Directors Guild award for documentaries (though the oft-predictive DGA did make Sean Baker and Anora its winner, too) and the one awarded on Oscar night. 

The Oscar went to No Other Land, the joint Palestinian-Israeli made film about the friendship between a Palestinian activist and an Israeli journalist. Given its advocacy of peace over warfare, it remains, by definition “controversial,” and significantly, still has yet to find a U.S. distributor. The DGA award, however, went to another searing look at another ongoing conflict, Porcelain War. 

Thanks to finding ourselves seated next to one of the Porcelain War’s producers, Paula DuPré Pesmen, at the Art Directors’ Guild awards (and more about the ADG in our “Part II” – how Dune-like! – of award season coverage next month!), we found ourselves on a Zoom with co-directors Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev a few days later.

Leontyev “co-stars” in the film – though the term seems a little too frothy given the subject matter – with his wife, Anya Stasenko, whose painted porcelain art adorns the film’s various one-sheets and ads. Leontyev, though, besides being an artist along with his partner, is also a member of Ukraine’s special forces, and has the duty to train the former civilians they know in the wartime “arts” of sniping, drone attacks, and survival. 

A third friend, Andrey Stefanov, also an artist, is credited as the cinematographer (he was also ASC-nominated), and was entirely new to the craft before cameras were smuggled to him so they could make the doc. 

Bellomo was initially exploring a film about Stesenko’s art, animating the intricate and whimsical paintings she adorns on the ceramics she makes with Leontyev, when instead – the Russian invasion began. 

So eventually plans pivoted to a documentary about ways art can provide a kind of spiritual nourishment, even in the hardest times. But how to document such a documentary, if you can’t bring a camera crew in? 

Bellomo knew “a makeup artist from New Jersey,” who was headed to Poland, and volunteered to “drive [a camera]  into Ukraine,” from there. It was a  Blackmagic Pocket Camera, because “it could record RAW – we didn’t want to do anything compressed,” and there was  “great highlight restoration in that codec  – you can get that bit rate unbelievably high,” an important consideration with the conflicting lighting conditions in a war zone. “And finally, it was a straightforward interface for Andrey.” 

Once the camera arrived, “we established an impromptu film school,” conducted online and via satellite connections. 

“We had no time to study this in a normal way,” Leontyev adds, in the English he’s picked up since coming to live, at least temporarily, in Colorado, with Stesenko, thanks to DuPré Pesmen. He credits Bellomo’s “amazing tutorials” so they could “pick up our cameras and go […] Really, as visual artists, we have as normal behavior trying to find something interesting, something important [to see].” 

Much of which, in addition to the inevitable atrocities, was focused on the metaphors in Stesenko’s art – empty bird nests, snails with their homes on their back. “From the very beginning,” Leontyev says, “we were focused on beauty – it was important for our message. Our movie is first about culture – culture is the source of our resistance, and the way of our resilience.” 

Walking out of the Dolby after the awards, we found Leontyev leaving too, still holding “Frodo,” the terrier who is the third member of their family. This made it possible to  thank him in person for the earlier interview, noting that shaking hands wouldn’t be necessary because by all means, one had to keep holding Frodo close.

The wellspring of culture, the nourishment of it,  was something echoed by Jomo Fray, the ASC’s Breakthrough award winner for his dazzling work with director RaMell Ross on Nickel Boys (and also the cinematography winner at the Independent Spirit Awards about which, more next time) who, when speaking in the Beverly Hilton’s ballroom, observed there was something “deeply human about images.”

Since they are created by us – whether on cave walls or cinema screens – in an attempt to make some sense of the world. Either the interior one, or the astounding exterior one. 

And perhaps, if there was any unifying theme to this award season – it was that. Whether the story was about the wounds borne by mythical witches, secretly idealistic sex workers, war-haunted architects (or sopranos), off-planet messiahs, aging actresses, sex-changed drug lords, young men railroaded into prison simply because of who they are or anything or anyone else. But honoring stories that remind us the ravaging we’re all feeling now isn’t actually “new” in history (even if the particular circumstances are) and people have survived it before. Or at least, hung on long enough to make their own stories –and images – about it, afterwards.

And thereby regain some humanity. 

We hit equipoise with our second part next month: Wrapping up award time (including the fire-delayed ceremonies yet to happen!), while pointing ahead to spring, summer and eventually, even Emmys. 

See you then. @Tricksterink / acrossthepondBC@gmail.com