‘Sinners’ Wins Best Cinematography at The Oscars 2026
Sinners has taken home the Academy Award for cinematography at the 2026 Oscars, making the film’s cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw the first woman and first Black person to win this award.
Until Arkapaw’s win, no woman had ever received the Academy Award for cinematography. Only three women had previously been nominated in the category: Rachel Morrison in 2018 for Mudbound, Ari Wegner in 2021 for The Power of the Dog, and Mandy Walker in 2022 for Elvis.
Arkapaw had already made history before the ceremony as the first woman of color ever nominated for the award. She collaborated on Sinners with director Ryan Coogler, with whom she previously worked on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
Arkapaw, who is of Filipino and Creole descent, was nominated alongside Adolpho Veloso for Train Dreams, Michael Bauman for One Battle After Another, Dan Laustsen for Frankenstein, and Darius Khondji for Marty Supreme.
During her acceptance speech, Arkapaw thanked Mudbound’s Morrison and other female cinematographers who had previously been nominated but had not won the award.
She also thanked Coogler, recalling, “Whenever I say thank you to Ryan, he replies and says, ‘no, thank you, thank you for believing in me and thank you for trusting me,’ and that’s the kind of guy that I get to make films with.”
In another moment during her speech, Arkapaw asked every woman in the room at the Dolby Theatre, where the Academy Award ceremony took place, to stand. Thanking the cast and crew of Sinners, she said she would not be there if it were not for them and invited the women present to rise to their feet.
Arkapaw also became the first female cinematographer to shoot a feature using both IMAX 65mm and Ultra Panavision 70 for Sinners. The film combines the extremely wide Ultra Panavision 70 format with the taller IMAX image, making it the first movie to be produced and released in both formats. In a video for Kodak, Coogler explained that the two formats create very different images. Ultra Panavision 70 produces one of the widest frames used in cinema, with a 2.76:1 aspect ratio. IMAX, by contrast, uses a much taller frame with a 1.43:1 aspect ratio. In theaters equipped to show both, the image can shift between the two formats during the film.
Recent Oscars have also highlighted the role of large-format film in cinematography. At the 2024 ceremony, Hoyte van Hoytema won the Academy Award for his work on Oppenheimer. The film used large IMAX cameras to capture both major scenes and quieter moments, and in his acceptance speech, Van Hoytema encouraged aspiring filmmakers to continue working with traditional film formats.
