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Angst and destruction are central recurring themes of the
98th Academy Awards, with multiple nominees using fire as a symbol of
humanity’s fatal disregard for the planet.
The Lost Bus is a high-octane docudrama from
Paul Greengrass about the wildfire that destroyed Paradise in Northern
California in 2018, serendipitously releasing months after the fire that
ravaged the LA metro area. The film calls out failed maintenance by electrical
companies, as well as drawing attention to changing climate conditions, as
typified by Fire Chief Martinez (Yul Vazquez) who states that ‘every year the
fires get bigger, and there's more of them. We're being damn fools; that's the
truth.’
In melancholic frontier drama Train Dreams, the
central character’s family is wiped out by wildfire, and he is tortured by the
guilt of being able to do nothing about it.
In Avatar: Fire and Ash the clue is in the
title. Varang, the leader of the Ash clan, teams up with the military
industrial complex embodied by Colonel Quaritch who says, “If you want to
spread your fire across the world, you need me.”
Other Oscar nominees including Frankenstein and Sinners feature
scenes in which fire is used to purge and destroy. If you want to look for
it, F1: The Movie has a pivotal fireball crash. Even Marty
Supreme has an explosive moment involving a gas station and a dog.
Greengrass has said: “The enormity of a wildfire speaks to
what we all feel, which is that our world is burning. Everywhere you look our
world is burning, and people know it and it troubles us all.”
Best Cinematography
Remarkably, One Battle After Another is
Michael Bauman’s first as solo Director of Photography (DoP), yet he has
already collected the 2026 BAFTA Award for Best Cinematography and the American
Society of Cinematographers (ASC) 2026 Theatrical Feature Film award for his
work on the film. Paul Thomas Anderson’s former gaffer was previously
co-credited as cinematographer with the writer-director on Phantom
Thread and Licorice Pizza before shooting 1.5 million
feet of VistaVision over seven months on this sprawling counter-culture comedy.
“These cameras are meant to sit on a tripod for an
establishing shot. They’re not designed to be strapped to a car, put on a
Steadicam, or dragged through practical locations,” Bauman says. “Their noise
is also loud. It’s basically like having a lawnmower on set so we had to design
and build a blimp for the camera just to make it usable. That alone was huge.”
Each thousand-foot mag could only shoot about four minutes
of footage. “There was all this machinery and process we learned. It was a
completely unique experience. I’d absolutely do it again—because it would be
easier next time.”
Director Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams wears
its debt to visionary director Terrence Malick on its sleeve. This founding
fable of America mixes naturalism with magical realism and was almost entirely
shot on location across Washington State using available light and weather
conditions. DP Adolpho Veloso earns a first Oscar nod for his immersive
photography which often frames characters below centre, or with corner framing,
to get a sense of their scale in comparison to their environment. One
dream-like sequence was shot on a Volume stage with slow shutter speeds while
one of two fire scenes was shot practically in a burnt forest.
Danish DP Dan Laustsen would be a worthy winner for his
supreme command of colour, and light amid the sumptuous production design
of Frankenstein. He’s been nominated for Guillermo del Toro
projects twice before; The Shape of Water and Nightmare
Alley. Although destined for Netflix, Lausten gives the story a cinematic
look composing wide angles to capture icy vistas and grandiose gothic interiors
and on Alexa 65 to produce an image close to 70mm print. For all the detail in
sets and costume, this version of Shelley’s classic succeeds in portraying
humanity in the monster.
“One of the scenes I like very much is the first time the
creature sits with his father in the lab, and his father is tenderly shaving
him,” Lausten says. “It’s a simple scene with the sunrise reflecting in a
broken mirror. You feel the chemistry between the two actors, and you can also
see that daddy doesn't understand anything about kids.”
At cinematography festival Camerimage, Autumn Durald Arkapaw
ASC revealed that Sinners starts with a different
sequence than was scripted. “It was only a few days before schedule when
[director Ryan Coogler] decided he wanted to turn that into an IMAX sequence.
It's a heavy dialogue scene and we’re shooting IMAX which is not a sync sound camera
so presented technical challenges.” It's now one of her favourite scenes
of any she’s shot; “I can't see it not being in IMAX so it was a beautiful
decision that he made.”
Technically, this was first movie to be simultaneously
shot on Ultra Panavision 70, incorporating 65mm in its widest aspect ratio, and
in IMAX, at the tallest ratio for 65mm.
The standout scene is a hallucinatory dance that transcends
its 1930s setting by birthing rock‘n’roll, electric guitar and hip hop from
Southern blues. Dubbed the ‘Surreal Montage’, Durald Arkapaw designed the shot
in three parts with hidden transitions because the IMAX cameras would spool
through 1000ft of film in little more than two minutes.
The kinetic narrative of Marty Supreme may
be driven by the intoxicating charm of its title character but it’s the
pantheon of indelible supporting characters which brings the film to life.
“There are more than a hundred featured characters in the
film — every day on set different actors arrived with these unforgettable
faces,” says Darius Khondji, previously nominated for Evita in 1996 and Bardo
(2022). “The faces look like something out of a Honoré Daumier painting — [and]
were incredible to photograph.”
Reuniting with director Josh Safdie after collaborating
on Uncut Gems, Khondji shot Marty Supreme on
35mm film using anamorphic lenses and referencing the work of 1950s street
photographers and turn of the century painters.
“Every director has their own way of doing things, but Josh
has an obsessive, intuitive way of making movies,” says Khondji. “Stylistically
speaking, he knows you usually don’t capture wide-angle shots using long lenses
— but the rules don’t matter to him.”
Best Editing
Norwegian drama Sentimental Value has
gathered a full house of Oscar nominations for its principal actors Renate
Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning so it’s
interesting to hear his long-time editor Olivier Bugge Coutté explain how
writer-director Joaquim Trier’s approach has evolved over successive films.
“At the beginning he was a little bit more controlled in
terms of the latitude of performances,” he explained during an interview with
CinemaEditor magazine. “Over time he’s gravitated to what might be called ‘jazz
takes’. That’s not to say there’s improvisation but there is much greater
freedom for the actors to move around the core of the text. Sentimental
Value is the furthest he’s gone in allowing actors to deliver a
different emphasis or change words provided it remains in the spirit of the
scene.”
This means Coutté received a lot of material with different
tones. “Joaquin often says that he's looking for a life-like moment, an event
to happen that feels representative of a moment of life. So, the edit becomes a
meticulous process of stitching together from a huge variety of possibilities.”
The brattish character of Marty Mauser in Marty
Supreme may not be to everyone’s taste but Timothy Chalemet’s
infectious performance and the ping-pong pace of the screwball drama glosses
over his faults. According to co-writers and co-editors Josh Safdie (who also
directs) and Ronald Bronstein (also a producer), the intensity of the script
and its convoluted storyline comes from an equally combative writing and
editorial process.
“Everything gets highly abstract by the time it reaches the
screen but every exchange is coming from some lived in experience,” Bronstein
says. “So we're sharing very intimate things with each other. The process is
invasive and we're not nice in the sense of not being sensitive to the other's
experience. One person throws an idea out and then immediately the other person
is tying it to a chair and beating the shit out of it, trying to get it to
confess its weaknesses.”
You might think that the huge volume of material required to
juggle for the Grand Prix action scenes were the most difficult for Stephen
Mirrione to manage in F1: The Movie. This included reviewing
and selecting takes from 20 cameras of actual broadcast race footage combined
with original material filmed by DP Claudio Miranda enhanced with layers of
VFX.
“You're talking about less than a minute or so of material,
versus hours and hours and hours,” he says of the workflow.
Yet keying into the main characters was most important for
the editor who won the Oscar for editing Traffic in 2000.
“Even in terms of the storytelling style, it took on Sonny's personality — a
little bit looser than the world he's in, a little bit crazier, unexpected,”
he says, about Brad Pitt’s maverick racer. That held true for the romance
between Sonny and his lead engineer (Kerry Condon).
“One of the first scenes that they did together was that
scene in the pub where he's asking her about the car and he goes a little bit
reckless with her, and she pushes back at him. Once we knew that part of the
relationship was dialled in, and that she could really give it back to him,
then we knew that the script was working.”
The genre-fluid Sinners switches in
and out of supernatural and vampire elements mixing in comedy, erotica, romance
and music. “A lot of what editors do is play with subtext that allow people to
engage with the movie on a subconscious level,” says Michael P Shawver who
lands his first Oscar nod. “There's one part when Annie (Wunmi
Mosaku) makes the Mojo bag for Smoke (Michael B Jordan) and I realised she
lights a match three times as part of her ritual. Then I noticed that at the
end of the movie, when Smoke gets the cigarette from Hogwood (Dave Maldonado),
he lights the lighter three times. I didn't ask if that was intentional but in
the film’s prologue, I took those same match strikes and put them as the first
thing you hear in the movie after the music comes in. It’s the rule of three.
Having three strikes three times in the movie. Did it do anything? I hope so,
but it's stuff like that that I like.”
Such subtly is in marked contrast to movies like Black
Panther: Wakanda Forever which Shawver also cut for Coogler. “In
the Marvel world you have to over explain. It's very complex. Things are
happening. You don't want people to be like doing the math,” he says. “In this
movie, because of how good the performances were, the cinematography, the
costumes, the writing, even if it wasn't over explained we trust our audience
to absorb that for the actual experience it is without worrying about
explaining everything.”
Action scenes are interspersed with slower paced dialogue
in One Battle After Another and these peaks and troughs
become literal in the mesmeric final car chase dubbed the River of Hills.
Having broadly mapped the sequence out, editor Andy
Jurgensen started by making selects of different camera views: in front of and
behind Willa’s [Chase Infiniti] car, and the cars in foreground and background
shots. “Then I pulled together the best reactions from Willa and the shots
where she's looking in the rearview mirror,” he explained to
CinemaEditor. “After that it was a case of experimenting, piecing
together, shaving things down. We didn't have Jonny Greenwood’s score at first
so we sent him a really long cut, and then he sent something to us with that
percussive beat. The sound department elevated it to another level.”
It helped to project the sequence at full VistaVision scale.
“I’d sometimes sit right in front of the screen and play it loud and try to get
that feeling of motion sickness. It helped me figure out where people's eyes
were going to land and to calibrate the rhythm of everything for a theatrical
experience because we knew this would be shown in IMAX.”
Best Visual Effects
Having ‘solved’ water in The Way of Water, James
Cameron and the team at Wētā FX in New Zealand turn their skills to fire in all
its multiple forms for Avatar: Fire and Ash. The film’s 3500
FX shots contain more than 1,000 of digital fire, ranging from flaming arrows
and flamethrowers to massive explosions and fire tornadoes.
“Physical fire is really hard to control, so we had to come
up with how to bend the physics towards the direction that Jim was giving it,”
explained Wētā senior VFX supervisor Joe Letteri to VFX World. “He was very
specific where he wanted the fire, what kind of speed, rate, size, how much or
how little energy.”
Cameron places as much emphasis on the performance capture
in his story as distinguished from genAI actors which he has called
“horrifying”. In post, the story is edited first based on the captured
performances before Weta applies facial animation and the CG backgrounds,
before re-editing the movie all over again.
When you set out to make the most authentic racing film ever
made, you're not supposed to notice the visual effects. That was the brief that
Director Joseph Kosinski gave Framestore’s Supervisor Ryan Tudhope following on
from their partnership on Top Gun: Maverick. For F1: The
Movie Framestore blended shots of Brad Pitt (as faded hero Sonny
Hayes) and Damson Idris’s (protégé Joshua Pearce) stunt driving with real
Formula One broadcast footage, using detailed digital skins, reconstructed
frame by frame. Six Formula 1 circuits were scanned using an eight-camera
array, allowing for millimetre-accurate match animation of racing environments.
The shattering of carbon fibre debris, sparks, tyre deformation and engine
smoke are all rooted in real racing incidents.
The Lost Bus might have got lost in the
public eye given its almost straight to Apple TV release, but it’s
docu-dramatisation of a real-life Californian wildfire is everything you’d
expect from the director of Captain Phillips. It also vies
with Avatar for the VFX realism of fire ranging in intensity
from crackling bushes to hellscape inferno.
Paul Greengrass wanted authenticity as far as safety would
permit for the journey of the yellow school bus loaded with children and driven
by Matthew McConaughey. Live action exteriors mostly shot on a backlot in New
Mexico were augmented by teams of vendors including ILM, beloFX, Cinesite,
Outpost VFX and RISE. Outpost’s main task was 100+ shots of an intense
smoke-filled trailer park sequence. Cinesite contributed 200 shots including
massive smoke plumes, drifting ashes, heavy dust, and fire-driven atmospherics
to show the bus escaping through a burning landscape.
Much of the environment around the bus was digitally
enhanced with moving trees, flying debris, shaking power lines and blowing
grass, while scenes inside the bus were enhanced with CG backgrounds, digital
cars, dust layers, and glowing embers. Everything was matched carefully with
live-action plates using compositing, lighting, and tracking work to make the
danger feel real and immediate.
Not an obviously heavy VFX film Sinners does
rely on a dual performance from Michael B. Jordan as twins Smoke and Stack.
“For half of the shots we went with a classic split screen approach, where we
shot Michael twice, and then combined the two passes,” explains VFX Supervisor
Michael Ralla. “With the other 50 per cent of scenes where there's a lot of
physical interaction between the twins we developed what we call the Halo rig.”
This is a carbon fibre harness with a ring of 10-12 cameras
that allowed them to capture Jordan’s whole head (not just facial) performance
in 360 degrees. Australian VFX shop Rising Sun Pictures took the data to
recreate Jordan’s performance replacing a body double’s head.
The film’s 1000 VFX shots, which also include vampire work,
were completed by Storm Studios, ILM, Base FX, Light VFX and Outpost VFX.
Back to the future for this franchise which kickstarted the
era of photoreal FX in 1993 landing Industrial Light & Magic the Best Oscar
for its work – all 52 shots. Jurassic World Rebirth sees ILM
delivering 1500 shots, more than any in the series’ history.
“There’s a narrative in the press about how everything is
done in-camera,” says VFX Supervisor David Vickery. “Well, yeah,
everything is shot in camera because you can’t ‘shoot’ visual effects. What
you’re trying to capture is as many practical things on set as you can because
you can’t go back and get it in post-production.”
Director Gareth Edwards tasked cinematographer John
Mathieson with shooting on film, recalling the aesthetic of Steven Spielberg’s
original.
“For a while, it was very ‘in’ to be shooting on green
screen, or fashionable to use animatronics, and that’s what the public wanted
to see,” Vickery adds. “Now there’s a desire to see things filmed on location,
and there’s an acceptance of visual effects, so filmmakers respond to that in
the way they make their films.”
