Breaking his Oscar jinx, when DiCaprio took to stage to accept his best actor trophy, the world expected him to look back at his cinematic journey but the 41-year-old star focused on climate change.
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Oscars host Chris Rock has tackled the controversy surrounding the lack of diversity in this year’s Academy Awards nominations in a biting opening monologue which drew attention to America’s dark history of racial conflict.
“Whether or not it was intentional, the show had a unifying theme, and every Chris Rock joke was a flawless riff on that theme”, he said.
It finally happened – Leonardo DiCaprio won his very first Oscar.
For Pakistan, it was time for celebrations as filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy won the Oscar for Best Documentary-Short Subject for her project based on honour killing titled “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness”.
The night’s most-awarded film, however, went to neither “Spotlight” nor “The Revenant”. The film managed to bag five awards for Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Costume Design, Best Art Direction and Best Actress in a Supporting Role. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, winning the director prize for the second year running, issued a call to “our generation to really liberate ourselves from all prejudice and … make sure for once and forever that the color of the skin becomes as irrelevant as the length of our hair”.
Talk of election was largely absent from the ceremony, though Vice President Joe Biden was met by a standing ovation before talking about sexual assault on college campuses in an introduction to best-song nominee Lady Gaga. With huge competition, the film deserved a spectacular win. Hungary’s concentration camp drama “Son of Saul” won best foreign language film.
But the wins at times felt secondary to the unflinching host.
The all-white list of acting nominees led to widespread criticism in the weeks leading up to Sunday night’s show and to the hashtag movement OscarsSoWhite. Several top African American filmmakers, Ryan Coogler (“Creed”) and Ava DuVernay (“Selma”) spent the evening not at the Oscars but in Flint, Michigan, raising money for the water-contaminated city. “We were too busy being raped and lynched then to care about who won best cinematographer”.
Picking up the climate-change issue again, DiCaprio said he is as obsessed with the issue as he is with filmmaking, and appreciated having the chance to reach millions of Oscar viewers with his message.
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The ratings for the three and a half hour broadcast was down 5% from last year’s 24.6 overnight rating and would give the awards its lowest overnight rating in eight years. Generally, the popularity of movies being honored tends to be the biggest factor in whether the audience for the live telecast is up or down.
