Although nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, RaMell Ross’ "Nickel Boys" did not garner a Best Cinematography nod for the film’s use of what the director calls "sentient perspective," an immersive first-person camera style.
Kristen Warner, an associate professor of performing and media arts in the College of Arts & Sciences, studies racial representation and employment—both in front and behind the camera—in the creative media industries. She says that the snub may be due to the use of the unique technique which challenges viewers to look at their own characters instead of just looking at characters on screen.
Warner says: “'Nickel Boys' has all the mechanics of an Academy film sweep: an adaptation of a bestselling novel from a Pulitzer-prize winning author; a harrowing narrative that weaves through time with thoughtful care and precision; and cinematography that challenges the dominant modes of storytelling for viewers.
“It signals an approach to cinema that, after so many siren calls of 'what's next,' answers with a declarative investment in pushing the viewer into the action and demanding we feel what these characters do. What's more, and what is currently so prescient in this moment we find ourselves, is that the eyes of identification we are being asked to sync to are young, southern Black men who find themselves in a living metaphor for how the world feels about them.
“I am very sure that this race was tight as Oscar races often are and I believe that the other films in the categories from which 'Nickel Boys' was excluded most surely deserve their place. But I think the difference between 'The Brutalist' and 'Nickel Boys' lies in what we value seeing: the VistaVision-istic view of a very painful, white world or the literal point of view of Black men suffering under the brutality of Jim Crow.”
For interviews contact Ellen Leventry, (607) 882-5833, eel2@cornell.edu.
