2019 Oscars: Inside the best cinematography and VFX categories

The pinnacle of awards season approaches with three of the films nominated for cinematography also contenders for Best Foreign Language picture.

Roma and Cold War are both based on the personal memoirs of their directors and lensed in black and white to evoke the past without sentimentalising the story in the ways that colour might have done.

Cinematographer Łukasz Żal also wanted director Pawel Pawlikowski’s Polish-language post-World War II romance Cold War to hark back to the monochrome films of the 1950s and 1960s. He shot digital on Alexa XT paired with Ultra Primes and Angenieux zooms but aimed to match the look of the film stock used in the former communist bloc. Location photography took place in Poland, Croatia and Paris.

“Everything changes when you shoot in black and white — costumes, makeup, hair, production design — because you are looking for the contrast in every place,” Zal told Deadline. “You are looking at a different reality.”

Roma is director Alfonso Cuarón’s low-key realist slice of biography about a family living in the Colonia Roma district of Mexico City in 1970. It has the signature elaborate long takes devised by Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki in collaborations like Children of Men and Gravity, but this time it’s (mostly) the director’s work.

When the shooting schedule for Roma ballooned to over 110 days, Lubezki – who had helped select the camera and prep the shoot – found a clash shooting Terrence Malick’s Song to Song and had to leave the picture. Cuarón – who also co-edited and scripted – took up the reigns.

As with Gravity and Birdman, some of the lengthy takes are not quite all they seem. In the film’s most audacious sequence at a beach involving a rescue from drowning, several takes are meticulously woven together to fit as one. Designed by Cuarón, the VFX along with ‘invisible’ set replacement and decoration, was completed by MPC.

Shot at 4K resolution on the Alexa 65 to lend the black and white tones a contemporary feel, the film’s detailed slow build scenes break like waves over the viewer and are best appreciated on the largest screen possible. That presents something of a conflict for the director who could only get the $15 million film made at Netflix.

As awards season approached, Netflix gave the film a limited theatrical run with 70mm prints (processed from digital at FotoKem in LA) and a widescreen aspect ratio.

“Offering cinema lovers the opportunity to see [Roma] in theatres is incredibly important to me,” said Cuarón in a Netflix press release which demonstrates the streamer’s confidence in its approach. “The 70mm print of Roma shows…