With the 20th Century Fox’s Cinemacon presentation having just concluded, the buzz is that Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant is looking like a definite Best Picture contender, the natural-light photography by dp Emmanuel Lubezki also seems Oscar-worthy, and that Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the lead, may well emerge as a Best Actor contender.

Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino sent the following message an hour ago: “Based on the footage we saw here for Scott Cooper‘s Black Mass and Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant, I’ll be very surprised if we don’t see an intense Best Actor race between Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio…very impressive stuff.”

A half-hour later I heard from Thomas Schultze, Munich-based critic and correspondent for the German trade magazine Blickpunkt, and he shared the following: “The Revenant footage is breathtaking. It ran between 60 to 90 seconds. A montage of stuff with no dialogue. The whole thing is being shot with natural light…no artificial light of any kind…and my thoughts were that Lubezski is going to be in the running for his third Academy Award, and that the Academy is going to think they’ve given Inarritu the Oscar for the wrong movie.

“It’s a survival in the wilderness film, as you know, and DiCaprio has the Jeremiah Johnson look down pat, like he hasn’t shaved or showered in six months…there’s a scene in which the trappers are being attacked by Indians…total chaos, people are dying, they have to escape on some kind of raft. The only movie I could compare it to off the top of my head would be The Last of the Mohicans. Totally authentic and real, and yet with a poetic quality.”

Two months ago Lubezki told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Carolyn Giardina that he’s shooting The Revenant with “one of the first models of the ARRI 6K Alexa 65, a new large-format Alexa with a 65mm CMOS sensor and wider dynamic range from ARRI Rental. ‘It’s amazing…I think it’s going to change everything,” Lubezki said of the camera, adding that he’s ‘semi-testing’ it and will be using it on the film. ‘We’re shooting in the mountains and incredible landscapes.'”