Oscars 2018: Roger Deakins is 14th time lucky, but why has he been overlooked in the past?

British cinematographer Roger Deakins has finally won an Oscar for cinematography for Blade Runner 2049 after being rejected by voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on 13 previous occasions. The Oscar for Blade Runner 2049 is a recognition of Deakins’s ability to create a convincing dystopian world in Denis Villeneuve’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic. The film drew mixed responses and tottered at the box office, but praise has been unanimous for its haunting imagery that evokes the strangeness and anxiety of a future governed by technology.

The Oscar win is also a belated acknowledgement of the 68-year-old cinematographer’s consistent brilliance, which has left critics, audiences and industry professionals in raptures, but has somehow not been deemed worthy enough by the Academy’s voters (who are also industry professionals). 

Deakins’s first Oscar nomination was in 1994 for Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption. He had already notched up impressive credits on documentaries and in British films, including Michael Radford’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) and Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy (1986). Deakins was not nominated for Bob Rafelson’s Mountains of the Moon (1990) or his first collaboration with the Coen brothers, the Hollywood satire Barton Fink (1991).

Darabont’s acclaimed adaptation of Stephen King’s 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption derives much of its mood from Deakins’s distinctive colour scheme and old-world framing. Set in the late 1940s and early ’50s, the story revolves around murder convict Andy’s attempt to flee the prison to which he has been sentenced for life. The lighting and framing mesh perfectly with the period setting and the sombreness of the story, which acquires colour and lightness only after Andy has flown the coop.