Dispatches from the Oscars

The Academy Awards took place last Sunday evening, and your intrepid FELIX team stayed up until the early hours of Monday morning keeping track of the ceremony on an illegal live-stream, significant portions of which were dubbed into Turkish. Truly, there is nothing we will not do for journalism. As usual, there were victories, surprises, snubs, and questionable jokes, and that was only in the office…

The biggest story of the night was the success of Mad Max: Fury Road, who swept up awards for six of its ten nominations. The awards may have all been for technical achievement – Sound Editing/Mixing, Costumes, Make-up & Hairstyling, Editing, and Production Design – and George Miller may have missed out on the Best Director prize. Nevertheless, the evening showed that big-budget action spectacles can have more of an impact then perhaps previously thought.

And, of course, after Mad Max claimed all those prizes, there was little left for The Revenant, who managed to win three Oscars, despite being nominated for 12. Sure, Leo won his Best Actor award (is it right to put ‘finally’? This may have been his fifth nomination, but I think you’d be hard pressed to name a year where he was actually ‘robbed’ of the award), Alejandro Iñarritu collected his Best Director trophy the second year running, and Emmanuel Lubezki was awarded Best Cinematography for the third year in a row. But The Revenant entered the ceremony as the frontrunner, and failed to clear up.

Most notably, The Revenant failed to win Best Picture, an award which went, in possibly one of the biggest surprises of the night, to investigative drama Spotlight – also winner of Best Original Screenplay. Writing in The Guardian, Alicia Shepard said the win for Spotlight, which focuses on the Boston Globe’s uncovering of the Catholic sex scandal, “can expose to a whole new generation why journalism matters”. That’s us here at FELIX. We’re journalism.

In a charged speech, producer Michael Sugar said that the message of the film should “resonate all the way to the Vatican”, issuing a direct challenge to Pope Francis to “protect the children and restore the faith”.

Spotlight’s win for Best Picture wasn’t the only surprise of the night. Mark Rylance won Best Supporting Actor, which was widely expected to go to Sylvester Stallone, for his role as Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies – the film’s only award. Best Visual Effects went to Ex Machina, the British sci-fi drama whose budget was minuscule compared to its competitors; Ex Machina beat out stiff competition for the award, including Star Wars, Mad Max, and The Revenant, whose CGI bear scene garnered acclaim. Alicia Vikander, the star of Ex Machina, also took home Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Danish Girl.

Ennio Morricone took home the Best Score award for his treatment of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Going up to receive the award, the 87-year-old Morricone was treated to a standing ovation, a recognition of his decades of work in the industry. Inside Out took home the award for Best Animated Feature, as expected, and British documentary Amy, following the life of the late singer Amy Winehouse, took home Best Documentary.

Sugar’s speech on the Catholic Church wasn’t the only pointed statement of the night; in fact, nearly all winners had something to say about the state of the world. DiCaprio used his time to address climate change, calling it “the most urgent threat facing our species”; Best Adapted Screenplay winner Adam McKay, who won for The Big Short, told the audience “if you don’t want big money to control government, don’t vote for candidates who take money from big banks” (a thinly-veiled attack on Hillary Clinton, who made $3 million from 12 speeches to big banks in 2013-15); and even Best Costume winner, Jenny Bevan, said that we might be heading towards a Mad Max world if “we’re not kinder to each other”. Such an innocuous message didn’t stop a whole row of celebrities from giving her the stink-eye as she strolled down the aisle to collect the award, decked out in a bejewelled leather jacket and scarf, giving the sartorial finger to any notions of what women ‘should’ wear at awards.

But all this was overshadowed by host Chris Rock, who used his platform as host to point out the racial inequality of Hollywood. If you’ve ever wondered what a room full of white people unsure whether to clap or not sounds like, just give his opening monologue a watch. There were some aspects of his hosting that did work well, such as the segment where he interviewed black cinema-goers in Compton, none of whom had heard of Bridge of Spies. It pointed out the glaring disconnect between what the public actually watch, and what gets nominated, as well as highlighting the disappointment at the lack of nods for Straight Outta Compton. Elsewhere, his jokes left a sour taste in the mouth, like when he quipped that in the past African-Americans were too busy getting “raped and lynched” to protest about diversity, or when he said Jada Pinkett-Smith boycotting the ceremony was like “me boycotting Rihanna’s panties – I wasn’t invited”. And then there were some that left us totally stumped, like his introduction of Stacey Dash as director of the ‘minority outreach programme’, who came on and wished the bemused audience a happy black history month.

Singer and ‘musician’ Sam Smith also tried to get in on the social-justice act when collecting his award for Best Original Song for ‘Writing on the Wall’, dedicating his award to the LGBT+ community. Unfortunately, he also tried to claim that he was the first openly gay man to win an Oscar (there have actually been, at my count, at least ten Oscars going to gay men). To be fair, he prefaced this with the claim that the fact no other gay man had won an Oscar “[might not] be the case”, showing us all that ignorance should never get in the way of saying what you want to say. When corrected of his mistake, he simply presumed he was the second gay man to win an Oscar. Someone then pointed out Howard Ashman had won two Oscars for Best Original Song, to which Smith quipped “I should know him. We should date”. Ashman died in 1991 from AIDS-related complications. Smith has since quit Twitter, and will – no doubt – claim that he is the first gay man to do so.