It’s one of the oddest and most dismaying of all Academy Awards factoids: The Best Cinematography category was introduced at the first ceremony in 1929, but it took 90 years and 596 nominations before the category had its first female nominee. Rachel Morrison broke that nine-decade male monopoly, the longest stretch for any gender-neutral Oscar category, in 2017 for her work on Dee Rees’ “Mudbound,” and the following year, she became the first female cinematographer to make a Marvel movie with “Black Panther.”
Those two films are among the standouts in a career that has also seen her serve as director of photography on “Fruitvale Station,” “Dope” and “Seberg,” and that has now expanded to include her feature directorial debut, “The Fire Inside.”