"Tangerine" got pretty close. Made it to Sundance and that was in 2014/2015 with an iPhone 5S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine_(film)

The threat to the industry definitely appears to be the bigger hurdle, but don't discount workflow. Offloading from an iPhone is non-trivial, especially when all big-budget movies employ at least one DIT (if not an entire team) to manage this process.

Well they gave a Grammy for best engineered album to Finneas (for his sister Billie Eilish's album), and it was recorded and produced on equipment most any of us could afford. Not so different.

I don't see the people who vote for Oscars being so concerned about threatening the foundation of the industry. That would require some sort of corruption or conspiracy, and I'm just not confident that is going on to that level.

You'll almost certainly see some short documentary or short subject at some point. (i.e. something almost no one ever sees) But other costs so dominate the actual photography, there's little reason to expect a studio to economize on the cinematography (and sound, etc.) other than someone doing it as a stunt.

A 17 year old with an iPhone, maybe.

Happily, plenty of industry veterans are finding uses for camera phones. https://momofilmfest.com/oscar-winning-claude-lelouch-cannes...

>I suspect we'll see a tipping point soon (if we haven't already) where more minutes of time are spent watching content produced on an iPhone vs an expensive film camera.

Counting Youtube/TikTok/whatever, this must have tipped years ago.