‘The Brutalist’ Wins Best Cinematography at the Oscars 2025
The Brutalist has taken home the Academy Award for cinematography at the 2025 Oscars ceremony, marking the second year in a row a movie shot on film has won the award.
The three-and-a-half-hour epic starring Adrien Brody as Lászlo Tóth follows the story of a Hungarian-Jewish architect as he looks to rebuild his life in the United States following the Holocaust.
It is shot on VistaVision film; a higher resolution, widescreen variant of the 35mm motion picture film. It was then finished on 70mm making for a stunning viewing experience in IMAX theaters.
VistaVision was created in 1954 by Paramount Pictures engineers. Unlike the traditional vertical 35mm format, it runs film horizontally through the camera. This allows for a larger frame size, capturing an image that is eight perforations wide (the space between sprocket holes), compared to the standard four perforations in the vertical format.
Who is Lol Crawley?
Lol Crawley is the cinematographer for The Brutalist and picked up the Oscar in Los Angeles on Sunday night. Crawley grew up in Wales, United Kingdom, and praised his home country during his acceptance speech.
The relatively low-budget movie, around $10 million, was shot in just 34 days. Crawley tells The Hollywood Reporter that he is “very conscientious of time.”
Crawley says the film’s director Brady Corbet is a “very pragmatic director” who “doesn’t shoot a lot of coverage, and he doesn’t give himself a lot of options. Basically, what you see in the movie is what we shot. He really knows what he wants, and some of the most pivotal scenes in the movie are shot in one shot.”
The cameras that Crawley and the crew used for The Brutalist were “finicky” and large format. There are very few cameras in existence that shoot the format.
“It requires technicians who know how to work with it,” Corbet tells Red Shark. “There’s still a culture of shooting on film in Hungary, unlike much of the rest of the world. For us, this was a big coup and one of the major reasons why I wanted to film in Hungary again.”
While the film is undoubtedly a cinematic masterpiece, a controversy around the use of AI during the editing process may have cost it more Oscars at the 97th Academy Awards ceremony. Brody received the Oscar for Best Actor.
Image credits: Header image A24.
