@rockmarooned Published March 15, 2026, 11:07 p.m. ET Where to Stream: Sinners (2025) Powered by Reelgood More On: Oscars 2026 Oscars 2026: ‘One Battle After Another’ Wins Best Picture Over Runner-Up ‘Sinners’ In Dramatic Fashion A Tearful Jessie Buckley Dedicates Her Best Actress Oscar to the “Beautiful Chaos of a Mother’s Heart” Paul Thomas Anderson Just Became a Rare Gen X Best Director Oscar Winner for ‘One Battle After Another’ Is ‘Hamnet’ Streaming on Netflix? Where to Watch ‘Hamnet’ Online Sinners made Academy Awards history when it received a record 16 nominations, more than any other movie in history — breaking a record that had only been tied for the past 75 years. It missed the record for most awards won — a tall order that would have required it to either win 11 (to tie) or 12 (to win). But with one of its multiple wins, it made Oscar history anyway.
Autumn Durald Arkapaw won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, blazing multiple trails at once. She is both the first woman to win in the cinematography category, and the first Black person to win the award as well. She was actually the first-ever woman of color nominated in the category — which, granted, says a lot about the Oscars’ long history of racial biases. But that shouldn’t take away from Arkapaw’s remarkable achievement.
Arkapaw shot Sinners partially on 65MM IMAX celluloid, a large-format medium favored by Christopher Nolan, which produces particularly rich . It’s a rare enough material that she was actually the first female cinematographer to shoot with it. Her work paid off; if you saw Sinners on a full-size IMAX screen (which, granted, is an exhibition format only available in a few dozen locations), you could see the full majesty of her dusky captures of the Louisiana-as-Mississippi scenery.
Though Arkapaw is an experienced DP, she’s not a decades-long veteran of feature films. She previously worked with Sinners director Ryan Coogler on the sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. (Rachel Morrison, one of three previous female nominees for cinematography, shot the first Black Panther; Coogler obviously supports women in film.) She’s also been the go-to cinematographer for Gia Coppola (granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola) on movies like Palo Alto and The Last Showgirl. She’ll be even more in-demand now.
Arkapaw has an unusual bit of kinship with her fellow 2026 Oscar winner Andy Jurgensen, who won for editing One Battle After Another: They’ve both worked on music videos for the rock band Haim. Paul Thomas Anderson directed a bunch of Haim clips, so Jurgensen as his one of his go-to editors cut them together. Arkapaw, meanwhile, shot the video for “Falling,” one of the band’s earliest singles. The Haim to Oscar pipeline is real!
You really can see Arkapaw’s vivid yet misty visual sensibility even in a video shot more than a decade prior to her history-making win.
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