BAFTA Crafts: Ari Wegner Becomes First Woman to Earn Cinematography Nod, Plus Other Notable Nominees and Omissions

No one will ever know how box office juggernaut Spider-Man: No Way Home would have fared in this year’s BAFTA nominations because, as previously reported, the film failed to meet the eligibility criteria when studio Sony missed a deadline to make the movie available to voting members on BAFTA View. But what crafts-watchers did learn from this morning’s BAFTA nominations is that, as expected, Dune will be a contender across BAFTA’s craft categories while there are some particularly notable individual talents representing various films in the nominations list.

Among them, Australian director of photography Ari Wegner became the first woman nominated for a BAFTA in cinematography, on the strength of her haunting work on Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog. Earlier this week, Wegner became the second woman to earn a feature film category nomination from the American Society of Cinematographers. (Rachel Morrison was the first woman to be nominated in the ASC feature competition and for an Oscar in cinematography, in 2018 for Dee Rees’ Mudbound, but that movie didn’t make the cut when the BAFTAs were announced that year).

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Production designer Adam Stockhausen and set decorator Rena DeAngelo were double nominated for the BAFTA in production design, for Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. Stockhausen previously won an Oscar and BAFTA for Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Meanwhile, in the film editing category, Joshua L. Pearson was nominated for Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s documentary Summer of Soul. It’s rare that a documentary is nominated in this category though not unprecedented. In fact, Senna, a doc about Formula One racing driver Ayrton Senna, won the category in 2011. (Pearson was also Summer of Soul‘s supervising sound editor and is currently nominated for a Motion Picture Sound Editors Golden Reel Award for that role.)

Summer of Soul is also a BAFTA contender in the documentary category, as is Flee, which also earned an additional nomination, for animated feature.

As for Sony and Marvel’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, the film is an Oscar contender, and is currently shortlisted for sound and visual effects. No Marvel movie earned a BAFTA nomination in VFX this year. Black Widow, Eternals and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings were all snubbed. (All are Oscar shortlisted).

Instead, VFX BAFTA noms went to Dune, Free Guy, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, The Matrix Resurrections and No Time to Die.

Feb. 4, 8:05 a.m. This story has been updated to clarify that documentary Senna won the BAFTA for film editing in 2011.