What’s Osc-urrin’?
Film Editor Jonah Hewett provides a brief recap of the events of this year’s Academy Awards.
So, that’s it – the 95th Academy Awards have been and gone. For those of you who care, we hope that your favourite films and characters won – which, it turns out, is the same as saying ‘we hope that your favourite film was either Everything Everywhere All At Once or All Quiet on The Western Front’. Here at Felix Film HQ we spent hours producing our Oscars pullout in Issue 1822, so we hope that you found it informative and helpful. If you didn’t see the pullout, we actually managed a 100% success rate for all of our predictions. If you did see it then, for the record, all of those predictions were Mike’s.
Everything Everywhere was certainly the star of the show this year, taking home a total of seven awards: the illustrious Best Picture, Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh), Best Director (the Daniels), Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan), and Best Original Screenplay. It also set its fair share of records, with Michelle Yeoh being only the second woman of colour to win in the leading actress category, and according to The Guardian it’s the first time multiple Asian actors won in a single year. Even for the most verdant Hollywood haters among you (and you would not be blamed for that opinion), that’s certainly something to celebrate. Or, depending on how you look at it, the fact that it took so long is something to be depressed about.
All Quiet was the other top scoring feature this year, taking home four awards: Best International Feature Film, Best Original Score, Production Design, and Cinematography. It’s a rare thing for an ‘international’ film to do so well, and one produced by Netflix at that, which might speak to the potential of streaming services to promote foreign language films that might otherwise be ignored by anglophone audiences.
The award for Best Actor went to a tearful Brendan Fraser, who, in a story almost parallel to that of Ke Huy Quan, expressed his gratitude at being given such a creative opportunity after so many years of being shunned by the industry.
Predictably, the night was not short of references to the infamous slapping of yesteryear, but in the end it turned out to be thoroughly mundane – as far as physical violence is concerned. However, the Felix Film bingo card actually was quite successful; hopefully some of you used it, and took as much delight as I did at actually getting a (tentative) bingo from our terrible jokes. Until next year!
