Autumn Durald Arkapaw Makes History with Best Cinematography Oscar Win

Arkapaw is the first woman ever to win the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, after already making history as the first woman of color to be nominated.

Autumn Durald Arkapaw won the Best Cinematography Oscar tonight for her spectacular work on Ryan Coogler‘s “Sinners,” making history as the first woman ever to win in the category and the first woman of color ever to be nominated.

“Whenever I say thank you to Ryan, he replies, ‘No, thank you,'” Arkapaw said in her acceptance speech. “‘Thank you for believing in me and thank you for trusting me.’ And that’s the kind of guy I get to make films with. He’s a very honorable person.”

Arkapaw went on to ask all the women in the room to stand up, thanking them for all the love she felt throughout awards season. “I’ve gotten to meet so many people and I feel like moments like this happen because of you guys,” Arkapaw said before thanking her cast, crew, and family. “These people are so beautiful,” she said of the actors, “and I’m honored to be there photographing them.”

“Sinners” marks Arkapaw’s second collaboration with Coogler after their previous partnership on “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” and Arkapaw told IndieWire that she knew it would be a special relationship from her first Zoom call with the writer-director. “It felt like we were long lost cousins,” Arkapaw said. “It just felt right, like I was meant to meet him and meant to be a part of that group.”

Speaking backstage, Arkapaw said that Coogler gave her and other female department heads on the set the opportunity to “shine and be ourselves.” Arkapaw added that when Coogler’s prior collaborator Rachel Morrison was unavailable, it was Morrison who recommended her for the job on “Sinners.”

“If this was going to happen, it was going to happen with someone like him,” she said to press. She also reiterated some of her comments on stage and said of her historic win that “it will change so many girls’ lives because they will be inspired” and will go to bed wanting to become cinematographers.

“Sinners” marked a quantum leap in Coogler and Arkapaw’s ambitions, not only combining a broad array of genres and topics in one epic film but giving Arkapaw the justification to shoot on both the extremely wide Ultra Panavision 70 process that Quentin Tarantino used for “The Hateful Eight” — and which had been used on spectacles like “Ben-Hur” and “The Greatest Story Ever Told” — and the extremely tall 65mm IMAX format.

“Sinners” alternated between both formats to powerful effect, an approach that enabled her to achieve a combination of period accuracy and visceral immediacy that was further enhanced by her careful selection of anamorphic lenses. Many of these were engineered specifically for “Sinners” by Panavision lens genius Dan Sasaki, though Arkapaw also “grabbed some other lenses, like the lenses from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.'” “I gravitate toward older glass generally,” she told IndieWire. “When you’re working with this format that’s very resolute, they pair nicely, as far as having age and texture to the image, because you want it to look like the 1930s.”

Given the audacious blend of genres and complex thematic layering, the critical and commercial success of “Sinners” was hardly a given, but Arkapaw did have a sense she was working on something unique during production. “It happened even in the tests,” she said. “We did a hair and makeup test, and just seeing Michael in those hats and walking on set — the power of his face — you just got so excited. There were so many moments on set early on where I would look at Ryan, and it would be unspoken: ‘Wow, this is really special.’ All you want as a photographer is to be inspired every time you look through the lens, and it was happening constantly on this film for me.”

Additional reporting by Brian Welk