Best Cinematography, 1944

Awards presented March 15, 1945
The nominees were ...
(Black-and-White) 
(Color) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Black-and-White) 

Joseph LaShelle and Otto Preminger filming Laura
Laura is probably too sumptuous to qualify as true film noir, the characteristically gritty triumph of 1940s filmmaking, but LaShelle's work on it has the noir touch: a heavy use of shadow and high-contrast lighting. Notice below, in the shot of Laura finding McPherson asleep in her living room, how the light emphasizes the glamour of Laura's portrait, in contrast to the rather washed-out real Laura in her plain hooded raincoat. Will McPherson be as fascinated by the real person as by the painted one? And the high-contrast shot as McPherson turns a lamp on Laura as he's grilling her is pure noir. LaShelle had gone to work as a lab tech at Paramount in 1920, planning to earn money for college, but he stayed on, working as an assistant to cinematographer Charles Clarke. He moved to other studios before winding up at Fox, where he worked with cinematographer Arthur C. Miller. He became a full-fledged director of photography in 1943. Laura was his first major film, and it won him his only Oscar, though he received eight more nominations. His was the only Oscar won by the film.
The supposedly dead Laura (Gene Tierney) discovers the detective (Dana Andrews) asleep before her portrait. 
McPherson interrogates Laura 
(Color) 

This was Shamroy's second Oscar, and he won another the following year, for Leave Her to Heaven, doing something in both films that was uncommon at the time: filming a drama in Technicolor. By the time he won his fourth, for the 1963 Cleopatra, color filming was commonplace, but the conventional thinking at the time was that color was suitable only for musicals and spectacles, that it would be a distraction from a drama. Today, color is almost the only thing of interest about Wilson.  

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Color) 

George Folsey
Judy Garland was painfully self-conscious about her looks. With her snub nose and high forehead she was hardly a conventional Hollywood beauty. But she never looked more attractive than she did in Meet Me in St. Louis. It helped that she was having an affair with, and would marry, the movie's director, Vincente Minnelli, who knew exactly how he wanted her filmed. So she had not only the assistance of MGM's hair and makeup department and Irene Sharaff's costumes, but also the lighting and camerawork of Folsey. He never won an Oscar, though he was nominated thirteen times, but did receive a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 1988.   Meet Me in St. Louis remains one of his landmark films, and one of the handsomest musicals to come out of the MGM production unit headed by Arthur Freed. Folsey later recalled how two of the movie's most memorable scenes were filmed. The Christmas Eve sequence, with the yard full of snowmen seen from Margaret O'Brien's bedroom window, was complexly lighted, and once it had been put in place and filmed, one of the electricians came to Folsey and told him that his readings showed it to be seriously underexposed. Instead, the results were haunting, perfectly in key with O'Brien's hysterical destruction of the snowmen. In the scene in which Tom Drake helps Garland extinguish the gaslights throughout the house, the lighting had to change as each fixture is extinguished. Instead of using dimmer switches, Folsey had Venetian blinds rigged to close in sequence. Though a classic, Meet Me in St. Louis received no Oscars.
Lucille Bremer and Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis
Margaret O'Brien and Garland
Garland sings about the boy next door
Tom Drake and Garland dim the lights 
O'Brien, Garland, and the snowmen

 
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