Perhaps the ASC and DGA Awards aren’t the flashiest ceremonies of the season, but being honored by one’s peers is always a cause for celebration, so let’s take a moment to congratulate Robert Elswit and Joel and Ethan Coen, shall we?
Elswit’s work on Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood netted him the feature trophy at the American Society of Cinematographers awards ceremony on Saturday, putting him at the top of a solid field that mirrored, for the first time in the ceremony’s history, the Academy Awards cinematography nominees. Elswit’s competitors included Seamus McGarvey for Atonement, Janusz Kaminski for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Roger Deakins, for both No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Accepting his award, Elswit was quoted as saying:
“I just think it’s impossible to pick these five films apart from one another. I’m really lucky that Janusz (Kaminki) did extraordinary work a year after he resigned from the ASC, and that Roger (Deakins) is competing with himself. To avoid this (from happening again) there should probably be a category called ‘best cinematography in a movie by Roger Deakins.”
Meanwhile, the Coen brothers took top honors at the DGA Awards, beating out Paul Thomas Anderson, Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), Sean Penn (Into the Wild), and Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) with their work on No Country for Old Men. Celebrating the brothers’ first DGA win, Joel Coen told attendees:
“We have a bookshelf in our office where we keep all the things we’ve won — we call it our ego corner — and whenever Ethan has a really bad day, he takes out the Windex and silver polish and cleans them up. This is a big one — it’ll keep him busy.”
