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.