Okay I should make a disclaimer at this point and say that I also think awards are silly and most of the time I wish they could just hand out more than one oscar per category. Like in 2007, Deakins work in Assassination AND No Country lost out to Elswitt for There Will Be Blood. There is NO WAY I can make an argument in favor of either Elswitt or Deakins there. All three of those movies are perfect in my view. Might as well flip a coin with three sides and hand out the prize that way.

But about Deakins cinematography in the movies I listed. One thing that sticks out to me is the way he's able to nail a sense of space. When I think of Fargo, I think of the setting as much as I do any particular performance or story beat. It's that overhead shot of the parking lot, with all its bleak repetition of form and that tiny, insignificant failure of a protagonist stumbling through the frame. That setup is like a master shot of the entire movie, for me.

And In No Country, he captured something about those desolate areas in Texas and the people who live there in a way that I hadn't seen in a movie before or sense. It felt true to me and my own experiences in those parts of the world.

I also think that Deakins use of lighting has such a nuance and simplicity to it that I find beautiful. It feels old fashioned, sometimes purposefully so like the classicist way he shot Proxy. I feel like many of his movies almost feel out of step from most bigger-budget movies I see in theaters now, but not in a bad way. I've read a lot of his posts on his awesome site and so I guess I'm biased, but I admire the way he plans shots (obviously working in coordination with the director and other departments) starting with darkness and then builds from there, crafting a shot with no more sources than is needed. I think about the way he lit the hotel in No Country or the way he shot basically every interior in Assassination as examples of just how evocative a shot can be with lighting choices that are so deliberate, sometimes superficially simple, even conservative in some ways.

And maybe this is just me admiring the technique more than any particular movie, but I really appreciate how well he seems to scale his setups depending on the size of the movie. To me it's just astonishing that the same guy who shot that glass hotel sequence in Skyfall also lit that last scene with Jones in No Country. They're both perfect (IMO) but so different in terms of complexity and scale.

I'm not a DP so I probably sound like an idiot.