Perhaps no other film this Oscar season achieved quite as much as much visually as the cozy, understated 1970s period drama, The Holdovers.

The film follows a group of high-school boys left behind at their boarding school during Christmas break, withering under the watchful eye of their most unpopular teacher, played by the always-wonderful Paul Giamatti.

The film is by no means flashy. In fact, it looks like it could be a relic from the 1970s. There are no massive explosions, no big set pieces – everything in the film seems tinted with a hint of nostalgia.

But the process behind achieving that very specific understated look was extensive, and, ultimately, revealed the ways that digital technology is surpassing other, more traditional filmmaking mediums at an astounding rate.

Cinematographer Eigil Bryld told Vanity Fair, “When we set out to make The Holdovers…we wanted to make a film that would look-and-feel like it was recently found in some kind of archive and released. We were committed to limiting the modern means we used as much as possible so as to resemble the shooting process from the ‘70s.

“The big issue was the filmstock,” said Holdovers cinematographer Eigil Bryld, “because there is no modern filmstock that looks anything like those from the early ‘70s. I’m old enough to remember shooting only on film and observing how filmstocks evolved and changed throughout the years, especially after the introduction of the digital intermediate, when they were eventually digitized and started to have much finer grain and low contrast.”

It seems like an obvious solution – to get an authentic ‘vintage look,  shoot on a vintage medium – film. Using film would undoubtedly have other benefits as well. There isn’t an auteur director alive (Nolan, Tarintino, Scorsese) that hasn’t shot at least one of their seminal modern movies on film. Nowadays, it is considered highbrow to shoot on film. Back in the 70s, filmmakers had no choice.

Bryld thought of that. He and director Alexander Payne discussed the issue extensively, and, as they told Vanity Fair, even ran a few tests.

“We shot tests on both digital and film,” says Bryld, “we even tried 16mm but we didn’t pursue it in the end because we couldn’t guarantee the amounts of stock we needed. And, we realized that if we decide to shoot on film, we’d still have to build-in a lot of the artifacts of the early ‘70s stocks in post. We would basically have to de-grain the image, then add grain again…which was quite discouraging, so we abandoned the idea.”

That left them only one choice. To achieve the desired 1970s vintage film look – grain and all – they would have to shoot on digital.

Now, in an ironic twist adding grain to digital film tends to look more like period realistic film than actually shooting on film itself.

It was a hurdle to overcome, and the cinematography team behind The Holdovers surpassed it in leaps and bounds. Though it was  digitally captured via the Arri Alexa Mini, to appear as if it was not only shot on a 35mm film stock circa the winter of 1969-70, but projected on a “questionable release print.” Virtually every celluloid-related textural element one might expect in a film captured nearly fifty years ago has been carefully digitally recreated.

It is a magnificent achievement – singular in its decided subtly. The Holdovers is proof of concept that digital film technology is getting better – and digital is better at being film, then film is.