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As the Oscars brings a “wow finish” to an award season full of twists and turns, Mark London Williams runs through an eventful finale in Hollywood, as Autumn Durald Arkapaw ASC made history as the first woman and woman of colour to win the Best Cinematography Academy Award.
Sometimes, it’s “the wow finish”, as Bogart called it in Casablanca, that shapes the whole narrative that came before. On the cinematography side of this just-concluded award season , that “wow” would be Autumn Durald Arkapaw ASC’s win for Sinners at the 2026 Oscars.
Entirely deserved, of course, the win still came as something of a surprise, with some palpable outbursts of, well, “wow!” heard backstage (including, perhaps, from this very correspondent). Earlier that evening, Sinners had been widely expected to win the first-ever casting Oscar, but gave way to One Battle After Another, so there was some worry that with Frankenstein picking up some (also well deserved!) key craft awards – in costume, makeup, and production design – perhaps Ryan Coogler’s vampire-saga-as-hidden-history would come away regrettably malnourished on Oscar night.
Though as Frankenstein’s production design winners would later note backstage, none of the nominated – and winning – crafts was particularly divisible from the others, with set decorator Shane Vieau giving his and production designer Tamara Deverell’s work with costumer Kate Hawley as a prime example of collaboration, saying “our job is to make costumes and actors stand out and pop. There’s such a collaboration over colour palette with that to make sure that every time one of Kate’s costumes comes out that, you know, first and foremost, we [also] blend them behind,” to which Deverell added “all the details are emphasised. I don’t think there’s a corner of a set that Guillermo (del Toro) and Dan Laustsen [ASC FSF], our wonderful cinematographer, don’t see. And so we leave no stone unturned. No piece of moss, no piece of set dressing. We really try to give a 360 [degree] world to Guillermo’s vision.”
That vision, however, and Laustsen’s help in bringing it to life, found itself nominated in a particularly heavyweight cinematography category this year, with Adolpho Veloso ABC AIP’s work on Train Dreams and Michael Bauman’s for Battle, having already won Critics Choice, Independent Spirit, BAFTA and the ASC Awards, between them – with Bauman copping those last two, and seemingly the momentum heading into Oscar night.
But even couching this as a “competition” does everyone a disservice, as Bauman more or less emphatically agreed, swearing – literally – on the carpet afterwards, where we briefly caught up with him, how good so much of the work was – Veloso’s, Arkapaw’s, Laustsen’s, along with that of Darius Khondji ASC AFC for the period look of Marty Supreme (created along with also-nominated costume designer Miyako Bellizzi and production design legend Jack Fisk).
It was Khondji who Bauman said “all of us learned from,” when citing that same illustrious group at the ASC Awards a week earlier (and noted in our previous column!), where he won the Theatrical Feature Award, while also praising the work of his peers. There, Bauman had commented that “so much” of One Battle After Another “is about the love of a parent for a child”, a theme writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson expanded on on Oscar night, saying “I wrote this movie for my kids to say sorry for the housekeeping mess that we left in this world we’re handing off to them. But also, with the encouragement that they will be the generation that hopefully brings us some common sense and decency.”
Durald was thinking ahead to following generations too, in her backstage remarks – where her historical win created a level of interest in the media room usually reserved for best acting and picture wins.
“It’s tricky because when you go up there,” she replied to the very first question, which had nothing to do with IMAX cameras or lighting, but about being a pioneer, nearly a century in the waiting, as the category’s first female winner, “you have so much to say, especially after 98 years. There’s so much in your head and you’re like, ‘Are they going to kick me off? Can I say all this stuff?’
“But one thing I was going to say that I had written down was that a lot of little girls that look like me will sleep really well tonight because they’ll want to become cinematographers […] just being on stage getting this award for a movie like that will change so many girls’ lives because they’ll be inspired when they weren’t before.”
Inspiration was one of the components propelling animation short winners Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, whose Canadian NFB-produced The Girl Who Cried Pearls gave them their first win in the category nearly 20 years after 2007’s also-nominated Madame Tutli-Putli.
In accepting, they mentioned the five years of painstaking work to produce the 17-minute opus, and we asked if, over that time, anything in their toolbox had changed, or was their gear – including shooting with a Canon EOS – consistent throughout?
“We actually listen to and study the work of actual cinematographers,” Szczerbowski said. “Our job is to try to abstract and translate what they do in real movies to our goofy little doll films.”
“In some ways, it’s a very traditional stop-motion film,” Lavis continued. “[It’s] like live-action animation […] basically all the gels and lamps and everything you would use in a live-action film, except we find tiny versions of them [and] you go one painstaking frame at a time […] and two seconds a day is a great day.”
“And thanks,” Szczerbowski added, “for reminding us that it took half of my daughter’s lifetime [to make]. We are embarrassed, make no mistake.”
Would all such embarrassments lead to such outcomes.
Their short-form colleagues on the live-action side got to enjoy the rarity of a tied category, between the Southern California-shot The Singers and the Parisian-set Two People Exchanging Saliva.
Both are so good it gave one pause to consider a reworked Oscars where there could be at least two winners in a category – but then, no one would likely get home ‘til the next afternoon.
We asked writer/directors Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh about their decision to shoot their elegant dystopia – set in the upscale Galeries Lafayette department store, which had given the film its backing – in black-and-white.
Referencing the “many black-and-white films we love”, Musteata said the format “also felt really appropriate to the subject matter. I mean, our film is set in a world where people are not allowed to kiss and intimacy has sort of been, you know, expunged from the world, so taking the colour out of it also made a lot of sense.”
“There’s a quality to black-and-white,” Singh added, “a little bit like an X-ray. You can’t hide from black-and-white.”
As many of the nominations showed, it wasn’t a year of hiding from much of anything – which made so much of the work so compelling. Something Arkapaw also touched on backstage, referencing a Karen O concert she’d been to: “She’s such a badass and I really love her. And she said, ‘You have to see you to be you.’ [Sinners director Ryan Coogler] gives us, the women on this film that are heads of department, those opportunities to shine.”
Those opportunities, particularly to shine together, turn out to be one of the drives to do the work in the first place. At least, according to best director winner Anderson, who’d come backstage for his own Q&A, with producer Sara Murphy, after One Battle After Another had also been crowned as the Academy’s best picture.
We noted backstage that the below-the-line categories had spread the wealth this year – not only Frankenstein’s awards, but music for Sinners, and sound for F1. We asked about his craft collaborations on One Battle, and how they helped bring that film’s vision to life, particularly with source material as complex as a Pynchon novel. “I’ve been doing this long enough to tell you that the reason I continue to do it,” he said, “is because of the people that I collaborate with. It’s probably not very fashionable to say that you don’t do it for awards or anything else, but, honest to God, the thing that gets me really excited about making films is collaborating with people. It’s now number one, you know, on my list.
“Maybe when you start out, you think […] whatever else you’re after, you just want to be in the movies. But as you get older and you do it, the only reason to do it is to be with people.”
Those sentiments echoed earlier in the evening when Avatar: Fire and Ash repeated its Visual Effects Society win from earlier in the season. Richard Baneham, who was both visual effects supervisor and an executive producer on the film, said, “We’ve been incredibly lucky and fortunate to keep a consistency with our crew. When you think about that, we’ve been making the same series of movies for nigh on 20 years and so many of our crew have been with us from the get-go. And that really imparts an intelligence, an emotional connection to the characters that just, I think, elevates everybody’s work.”
It was a motif evident through this round of award season. Indeed, the Friday just before Oscars traditionally brings us the Publicists Awards, a luncheon where the guild members (they’re affiliated with the cinematographers of ICG 600, as it happens) vote on what are deemed some of the previous year’s (stretching back to the preceding Emmys) most effective “campaigns” in terms of audience awareness for film and TV shows. Coming as a luncheon at the Beverly Wilshire, it also signals that Academy’s finish line looms immediately after.
As with most award programmes, there are also honourees along with the competitive categories, which this year included Noah Wyle, Jimmy Kimmel and, as the Showperson of the Year, Kate Hudson, who of course was Oscar-nominated for her splendid turn in Song Sung Blue.
In her acceptance, she mentioned that we currently live in “a world of constantly shifting narratives” and that “to put on a great show, you have to work in harmony with someone.” She added that “essentially how we survived as a species [is] … we tell stories.”
Amidst those “shifting narratives”, it’s always good to alight on one that provides hope – especially in a quickly unravelling age like our own. Some 50 or so hours after Hudson’s comments, Arkapaw realised she’d become part of one of those larger stories herself.
“I wanted to say thank you,” she remarked, also in the press room, “because I don’t know a lot of the voters. I’ve learned over the past few months going through this process that it does take a village to make stuff like this happen. But this isn’t about me anymore. This is about so much more.
“And I know that. I wanted it for all the ladies in the room, and I wanted it for all the girls at home. So it happened, and I’m so happy for that because I want to give that to them.”
And what better way to head into spring than with a spark of inspiration, after all?
Here’s to hope among the blooms, and we’ll see you a bit further into the season.
@TricksterInk / [email protected]
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