No woman has even won an Oscar for best cinematography, and that’s not likely to change in 2025. Why? Because no women made the final five. But this year, the American Society of Cinematographers could be righting Oscar’s wrong.
ASC has only handed out the top prize once to a woman — Mandy Walker, who won in the feature competition in 2023 for “Elvis.” Now, for the first time since 2014, the feature competition field has expanded its nominees to seven, with Alice Brooks landing a nomination for her work on “Wicked.”
Brooks had one goal for the big screen adaptation of the hit musical, that “it would be the most beautiful love story between these two women,” she says, referring to Glinda (Ariana Grande) and Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), who star as the famous witches of Oz.
Brooks is Jon M. Chu’s go-to DP since their filmmaking days at the University of Southern California. She has been at his side helping to deliver his vision, collaborating on “Jem and the Holograms,” “In the Heights” and “tick, tick…Boom!”
She came in early to “Wicked,” discussing visual themes for the film, spending 18 weeks testing for color and lighting. She suggested that the time of day represent each character, with Elphaba’s lighting associated with the sunset, and Glinda’s would be related to sunrises.
How best to capture Elphaba’s green makeup on Erivo called for the lighting to be properly navigated. Erivo, who spent hours in the makeup chair turning green, calls Brooks “the hero of the film.”
“She took care of the light that shines on Elphaba,” Erivo says. “I love it when Elphaba changes shades of green. Sometimes she’s a blue-green, other times she’s slightly more yellow-green, or she’s green and saturated. There’s something beautiful about the way the light changes what green she is.”
Should Brooks win the ASC award, she would be only the second woman ever to take home the prize in the feature film category. But she faces stiff competition.
Brooks is nominated alongside Jarin Blaschke (“Nosferatu”)and Lol Crawley (“The Brutalist”) both who have won at other awards shows in the run up to ASC. Stéphane Fontaine (“Conclave”), Greig Fraser (“Dune: Part Two”), Edward Lachman (“Maria”) and Phedon Papamichael ( “A Complete Unknown”) round out the nominees.
Blaschke won ASC’s Spotlight Award in 2019 for “The Lighthouse.” And Crawley brought back the rarely used VistaVision to improve image quality and “to pull the film horizontally across eight perforations at a time. So, you end up with a bigger format.”
On “Conclave,” Fontaine worked closely with production designer Suzie Davies, using lighting to deliver the film’s ideas of opposing themes of “light and dark, honesty and lies, gold and silver, contemporary and traditional,” as Davies put it. While she incorporated that into her sets, Fontaine worked that into his lighting. Casa Santa Marta was a visually darker world with linear patterns and darker lighting, while, in contrast, the Sistine Chapel was lighter and had a sense of freedom.
Fraser, who won an ASC for “Dune: Part One,” is hoping to win another for its sequel. Director Denis Villeneuve wanted the planet of Giedi Prime to look monochromatic. Having worked with infrared lighting technology on “Zero Dark Thirty,” Fraser took the black and white experience one step further. He relied on his experience there to light the Harkonnen arena fight scene using that same tech.
With decades of work behind him, both ASC and Oscar elude Lachman. The former has given him a lifetime achievement award, and this year, he looks to win for “Maria.” He used various film formats to help Pablo Larrain tell operatic superstar Maria Callas’ life story: 35mm, 16mm and 8mm color and 35mm B&W.
“A Complete Unknown” director James Mangold’s frequent collaborator, Papamichael, landed his sixth nod with the society. In telling the story of Bob Dylan’s arrival to New York and his rise as a folk singer, Papamichael’s objective was to get inside the character’s head and make audiences understand what made him tick.
The ASC will hand out their top prizes on Feb. 23 at the Beverly Hilton.
