Academy Award for Best Cinematography

The Academy Award for Best Cinematography is an Academy Award awarded each year to a cinematographer for work on one particular motion picture.

History

In its first film season, 1927–28, this award was not tied to a specific film; all of the work by the nominated cinematographers during the qualifying period was listed after their names. The problem with this system became obvious the first year, since Karl Struss and Charles Rosher were nominated for their work together on Sunrise. Still, three other films shot individually by either Rosher or Struss were also listed as part of the nomination. In the second year, 1929, there were no nominations at all, although the Academy has a list of unofficial titles that were under consideration by the Board of Judges. In the third year, 1930, films, not cinematographers, were nominated, and the final award did not show the cinematographer's name.
Finally, for the 1931 awards, the modern system in which individuals are nominated for a single film was adopted in all profession-related categories. From 1939 to 1966 with the exception of 1957, there were also separate awards for color and black-and-white cinematography. After Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the most recent black-and-white films to win since then are Schindler's List, Roma and Mank.
Floyd Crosby won the award for Tabu in 1931, which was the last silent film to win in this category. Hal Mohr won the only write-in Academy Award ever, in 1935 for A Midsummer Night's Dream. Mohr was also the first person to win for both black-and-white and color cinematography.
No winners are lost, although some of the earliest nominees are lost, including The Devil Dancer, The Magic Flame, and 4 Devils. The Right to Love is incomplete, and Sadie Thompson is incomplete and partially reconstructed with stills.
David Lean holds the record for the director with the most films that won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography at the Oscars with five wins out of six nominations for Great Expectations, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and Ryan's Daughter.
The first nominees shot primarily on digital video were The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Slumdog Millionaire in 2009, with Slumdog Millionaire being the first winner. The following year, Avatar was the first nominee and winner to be shot entirely on digital video.
In January 2017, Bradford Young became the first African-American cinematographer to be nominated for an Academy Award, for his work on Arrival.
In 2018, Rachel Morrison became the first woman to receive a nomination. Prior to that, it had been the last non-acting Academy Award category to never nominate a woman.
In 2019, Alfonso Cuarón became the first winner of this category to have also served as director on the film, for Roma. This followed a public dispute between Cuarón and the Academy over the Academy's plan to shorten the Oscars broadcast by relegating four awards, including cinematography, to the commercial breaks in the show. Cuarón objected by saying, "In the history of cinema, masterpieces have existed without sound, without color, without a story, without actors and without music. No single film has ever existed without cinematography..."

Superlatives

Winners and nominees

1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

Year	Film	Nominees
1970	Ryan's Daughter	Freddie Young
1970	Airport	Ernest Laszlo
1970	Patton	Fred J. Koenekamp
1970	Tora! Tora! Tora!	Osamu Furuya, Shinsaku Himeda, Masamichi Satoh and Charles F. Wheeler
1970	Women in Love	Billy Williams
1971	Fiddler on the Roof	Oswald Morris
1971	The French Connection	Owen Roizman
1971	The Last Picture Show	Robert Surtees
1971	Nicholas and Alexandra	Freddie Young
1971	Summer of '42	Robert Surtees
1972	Cabaret	Geoffrey Unsworth
1972	1776	Harry Stradling Jr.
1972	Butterflies Are Free	Charles Lang
1972	The Poseidon Adventure	Harold E. Stine
1972	Travels with My Aunt	Douglas Slocombe
1973	Cries and Whispers	Sven Nykvist
1973	The Exorcist	Owen Roizman
1973	Jonathan Livingston Seagull	Jack Couffer
1973	The Sting	Robert Surtees
1973	The Way We Were	Harry Stradling Jr.
1974	The Towering Inferno	Fred J. Koenekamp and Joseph Biroc
1974	Chinatown	John A. Alonzo
1974	Earthquake	Philip H. Lathrop
1974	Lenny	Bruce Surtees
1974	Murder on the Orient Express	Geoffrey Unsworth
1975	Barry Lyndon	John Alcott
1975	The Day of the Locust	Conrad L. Hall
1975	Funny Lady	James Wong Howe
1975	The Hindenburg	Robert Surtees
1975	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest	Haskell Wexler and Bill Butler
1976	Bound for Glory	Haskell Wexler
1976	King Kong	Richard H. Kline
1976	Logan's Run	Ernest Laszlo
1976	Network	Owen Roizman
1976	A Star Is Born	Robert Surtees
1977	Close Encounters of the Third Kind	Vilmos Zsigmond
1977	Islands in the Stream	Fred J. Koenekamp
1977	Julia	Douglas Slocombe
1977	Looking for Mr. Goodbar	William A. Fraker
1977	The Turning Point	Robert Surtees
1978	Days of Heaven	Néstor Almendros
1978	The Deer Hunter	Vilmos Zsigmond
1978	Heaven Can Wait	William A. Fraker
1978	Same Time, Next Year	Robert Surtees
1978	The Wiz	Oswald Morris
1979	Apocalypse Now	Vittorio Storaro
1979	1941	William A. Fraker
1979	All That Jazz	Giuseppe Rotunno
1979	The Black Hole	Frank V. Phillips
1979	Kramer vs. Kramer	Néstor Almendros