Oscar prediction lists have two sides to them.
There’s the educated guess by critics and cinephiles that’s based on the Academy’s pattern and politics. Often, it is at odds with their personal picks. The majority rightly predicted Leonardo DiCaprio finally winning the the Best Actor prize for The Revenant , or Alejandro G Iñárritu winning Best Director for the same. But these weren’t necessarily in agreement with their ideas of the most deserving.
However, if there’s one name for whom the gap between ‘will win’ and ‘should win’ almost didn’t exist. it is Emmanuel Lubezki. Even if that meant that the Mexican would create Oscar history as the first cinematographer to win three consecutive times. Or the fact that the Academy, given its track record for giving consolation prizes for the wrong film in the wrong year, could hand it over to Roger Deakins, another modern great who has 13 nominations but not a single win, for Sicario . But
Lubezki’s work in The Revenant , much like Gravity and Birdman , is a visual miracle hard to ignore. Without his artistry with natural light, live action and CGI, these films wouldn’t exist.
While his old friend and collaborator Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity showed us how intimate the space between two people can be, it also made us feel the infinite loneliness when one is without the other. In the following year’s Birdman , with another compatriot, Inarritu, he pulled out another trick from his bag. He gave us a seemingly one-shot film that throbs with kinetic energy and fervour. In The Revenant , the 51-year-old takes his use of natural lighting to another extreme, capturing the staggering beauty of wintry wilderness. What has made Lubezki a modern great is his label-defying work that embraces natural light as much as CGI. Even when he didn’t have humungous budgets to work on, he gave us some of the most unforgettable sequences in cinema history: whether it was the one-take car ambush scene in Children of Men , where the frivolous and light mood inside a car is turned on its head when rioters launch a surprise attack or the visual poetry in Terrence Mallick’s Tree of Life . Then there’s also the poolside masturbation scene in Cuarón’s low-budget Spanish indie Y Tu Mama Tambien , that signs out with an underwater POV shot of semen dissolving in the water.
While Lubezki continued his winning streak, veteran Ennio Morricone ended his dry spell at the Oscars by winning his first Best Original Score; he was awarded an Honorary Lifetime Achievement in 2007. This was the sixth nomination of the 87-year-old great, making him the oldest Oscar winner.
The granddaddy of soundtracks has been snubbed by the Academy several times when he should have won, most notably The Mission (1986), when Morricone famously called it a ‘theft’.
But the Italian composer, who still doesn’t know to speak in English as we saw in his acceptance speech, even after composing in Hollywood for over 50 years, has fittingly won it for The Hateful Eight . It is a film that gives Morricone a starring role and a throwback to his earlier work: especially his score in horror classics such as John Carpenter’s The Thing and in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns . Morricone’s work can be described as distinctly cinematic, hair-raisingly larger-than-life and romantically melodious.
Tarantino, a major fan of the maestro, who coaxed the octogenarian to work with him, uses his ominous, atmospheric soundtrack to heighten the sense of tension and foreboding in the film.
But no composer has been associated with a genre as Morricone has been associated with Westerns. For instance, the Dollars Trilogy gave us one of the most exhilarating and also most mimicked, whistled, and parodied musical themes in movie history: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly . Or his last hurrah with Leone, his friend from school, in Once Upon a time in America .
But Morricone’s body of work is bigger than just Westerns; those comprise a mere 10 per cent. His work also extends to Italian art films such as the orchestral outbursts of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 and/or the emotional strains of Cinema Paradiso .