What cameras are being used on the 2025 Best Cinematography Oscars nominees?

So, which is the most popular camera in the 2025 Best Cinematography Oscars nominees, used on three out of the five titles? The answer might surprise you.

Then again, it might not. For all the insistent chatter that film is dead, there is a lot of celluloid in the picture when it comes to looking at the Best Cinematography nominees at this year’s Oscars. Indeed, from the Super 8 film used to add an authentic vintage feel to the home movie footage shot for Maria, to the full-on glory of the VistaVision 70mm used in sections of The Brutalist, there is a real resurgent film feel across a range of different formats.

The most used camera across the five nominated films though — The Brutalist, Dune: Part 2, Emilia Pérez, Maria, and Nosferatu — doesn’t shoot in either of those formats. Rather The Brutalist, Maria, and Nosferatu leant into the long standing 35mm pedigree of the industry workhorse ARRICAM. Sure, technically that splits into the ST and the LT, the Studio and the more portable, often-found-on-Steadicam, Light, but both are designed for quiet operation and sync sound and are different versions of the same thing. The noisier, and therefore dialogue unfriendly, Arriflex was used for some scenes on The Brutalist and Maria.

Dune: Part 2, meanwhile, shot digitally on ALEXA 65 and ALEXA LF, and Emilia Pérez shot some scenes in Mexico on ALEXA Mini, giving the company an impressive five out of five across film and digital. This builds on the company’s excellent showing in the 2024 Oscars, where it was present on three out of the five nominees (El Conde, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Poor Things). 

The main outlier as far as 2025 goes is Emilia Pérez, which according to IndieWire who is the custodian of much of this information (at least till after the Awards, when manufacturers become more than happy to talk about their successes), shot digitally primarily on Sony Venice 2, with some Mexican scenes shot on ALEXA Mini and RED Komodo.

The other movie doing something very different, of course, is The Brutalist. We’ve written before on how it was shot on VistaVision, and the camera in question was the Beaumont VistaVision. There aren’t many of these around and each one is built slightly differently. They’re large, heavy, and can be noisy, and following the success of The Brutalist are probably going to be even more difficult to get hold of than they were a year ago. 

We’ll no doubt have more on this next week after Sunday evening’s ceremonies.  Who’s going to win? Smart money in this category is on The Brutalist, while the Best Picture award is a toss up between Anora and Conclave. Place your bets ladies and gentlemen. Either way, the winner this year looks set to be celluloid in all its various forms.