 |
| Spotlight took home the award for Best Picture on Sunday night at the Academy Awards. |
We can now put a bow on the most unpredictable Oscar season
in recent memory. With four films battling it out for the top award going into
the night, the Academy spread the love around to all of them. Tom McCarthy’s
masterful investigative journalism drama Spotlight
took Best Picture, as well as Best Original Screenplay, while George Miller’s
action extravaganza Mad Max: Fury Road
picked up six awards, all in the crafts categories.
Alejandro González Iñárritu won his second consecutive Best
Director award – just the third person in history to achieve that feat – for his
epic The Revenant, for which Leonardo
DiCaprio earned his first Oscar for Best Actor and Emmanuel Lubezki won his
record third straight Best Cinematography award. Adam McKay and Charles
Randolph won Best Adapted Screenplay for McKay’s The Big Short, which was shut out elsewhere on the night.
With DiCaprio taking home Best Actor and frontrunners Brie
Larson and Alicia Vikander winning Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress,
respectively, the only surprise in the acting categories came in Best
Supporting Actor, where Mark Rylance won for his glorious, subtle performance
in Bridge of Spies, besting
sentimental favorite Sylvester Stallone for Creed.
Chris Rock proved a tremendous host and pulled no punches
when it came to the diversity issue that has hovered over this Oscars season.
He was funny, sharp, and quick, moving the show along while also delivering a
damn fine evening of entertainment. His bit with the Girl Scout cookies was
hysterical – a relative of and improvement upon Ellen Degeneres’ pizza-delivery
stunt from two years ago – and he successfully revisited one of the most famous
sketches in recent Oscar history, asking movie-goers in Compton whether they had
seen the nominees. They had not.
DiCaprio, who earned a standing ovation from a crowd clearly
excited to hand the thespian his first Academy Award, thanked the people who
made The Revenant possible and
thanked his parent before going off on an impassioned speech about the
environment and our responsibility to be stewards of the natural world.
DiCaprio’s victory was as much a foregone conclusion as any on Oscar night, and
the whole movie-loving world was waiting for this moment. DiCaprio owned every
second of it with a speech that will be replayed and rewatched for decades to
come.
The biggest surprise of the night came when the low-budget sci-fi
thriller Ex Machina beat out four
huge blockbuster hits in Best Visual Effects, likely due to split support among
the more popular films. The win was one of my favorite moments of the evening
on a show full of moments that made me cheer out loud. In addition to wins for
DiCaprio, Spotlight, and Ex Machina, I was most excited for Bear Story in Best Animated Short, Stutterer in Best Live Action Short, and
Ennio Morricone winning Best Original Score for The Hateful Eight.
I had some problems with the broadcast and some of the
winners, but I am just so overjoyed for the Spotlight
team and DiCaprio that I do not want to focus on those right now. I will have a
more thorough reaction tomorrow, but for tonight, let’s just enjoy the fact the
Academy awarded a masterpiece of American film its top award.
Good night. More to come tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment