The Oscars, the three and a half hour ceremony where the glitzy, million dollar movie industry pat themselves on the back. It airs live over here in the early hours of the morning, I stayed up until 5 o’clock to watch it so you didn’t have to, I’ll recap / review the ceremony here.
Maybe they should have been called the ‘Mad Max: Fury Road awards’, the dystopian blockbuster isn’t usually the type of film that the Academy lavishes with statues of little gold men. Mad Max walked away with the night winning six awards – Editing, Costume, Makeup, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing and Production design – but fans are claiming that the film deserved to win in the bigger categories. In any case, at some point in the night it was looking as if DiCaprio’s win wasn’t such a foregone conclusion anymore.
The Revenant looked set to take all the big awards, and there were no surprises in these categories: winning Best Actor (DiCaprio), Best Director (Alejandro González Iñárritu) and Best Cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki). Other awards inevitabilities were Inside Out winning the Best Animation; Spotlight taking away the ultimate award for Best Picture and Brie Larson taking away the Best Actress award, for her role in Room. The less assured categories were Supporting Actor/Actress, everyone’s money was on Sylverster Stallone but that award went to Mark Rylance; Aliclia Vikander won Supporting Actress for The Danish Girl, The Academy probably taking in to account her role in Ex Machina, a British sci-fi film that deservedly nabbed the statuette for Best Visual Effects. A powerful performance by Lady Gaga of “Till It Happens to You” from The Hunting Ground, a documentary film about alleged incidents of sexual assault on college campuses in the United States, didn’t win against the terrible Bond song, “Writing’s On the Wall”, prompting an ill-informed acceptance speech by Sam Smith to claiming to be the first openly gay man to win an Oscar.
The ceremony itself, a couple of “f**ks” were uttered; one joke about Donald Trump; Sam Smith upsetting gay Oscar winners and the director of Son of Saul – winner of best foreign language set in the Holocaust – getting played of the stage by music from Hitler’s favourite composer!, apart from this nothing much actually happened – gone are the days when there’s a streaker while someone like David Niven is onstage, or someone rejects an Oscar in protest – although there was an odd and seemingly pointless appearance by C3-PO, R2D2 and BB-8. The comedy from the presenters of individual awards was hit and miss, on the one hand there was Chris Rock bringing out boxes for two young actors to stand on, on the other hand there was Olivia Wilde looking slightly awkward standing next to Ali G!
So, some things we expected to happen happened (DiCaprio), however much the minority of us hoped it wouldn’t; some maybe unexpected things happened (Mad Max) and some things we wanted to happen didn’t happen (Carol, Cate Blanchett) and some winners were ushered of the stage by The Ride of the Valkyries. At the end of the day, the adorable Jacob Tremblay aside, I remember the Oscars being a bit more entertaining.
words CHRIS WILLIAMS